Who was Max Yasgur?

When festival organizers lost their planned venues in Saugerties and Wallkill, they turned to Yasgur, who leased a field on his farm for a fee later reported as $10,000. According to his son Sam, part of the motivation was practical: a wet year had hurt hay production, and the rental income would help cover the cost of buying hay to replace it.

The decision provoked fierce local backlash even before the festival began. Signs went up around Bethel reading messages such as 'Local People Speak Out Stop Max's Hippie Music Festival' and 'Buy no milk.' Yasgur began receiving a mix of threatening and supportive phone calls, calls that had to go through an operator since the local exchange in White Lake still used manual switching. Supportive calls ultimately outnumbered hostile ones.

Yasgur's willingness to proceed was rooted in principle as much as practicality. He believed strongly in freedom of expression and was angered by the hostility some townspeople showed toward young people associated with the anti-war movement. Hosting the festival became something he treated as a personal cause, and promoter Michael Lang later called him his hero despite their obvious differences in outlook.

Once the crowds arrived, far exceeding anyone's expectations, Yasgur worked to make sure attendees were cared for. He provided food at cost or for free, and when he learned some locals were selling water to concertgoers, he put up a sign at his barn on Route 17B offering free water instead. He reportedly told friends he could not understand how anyone could charge money for water, and he directed his children to fill empty milk bottles from the dairy plant with water and give away milk products to those attending.

On the festival's third day, just before Joe Cocker's set, Yasgur addressed the crowd directly. He told them he did not know how to speak to large groups, but that they had proven to the world that half a million young people could gather for three days of music and fun without incident. The audience responded with a massive cheer, and the moment became one of the defining images of the festival.

Woodstock's aftermath was far harder on Yasgur than the event itself. Many neighbors turned against him, and he stopped feeling welcome at the local general store. Even the town postmaster reportedly grew hostile, prompting the Yasgurs to change their mailing address from Bethel to the nearby town of Cochecton.

In January 1970 neighbors sued him over property damage caused by festival attendees, even though the damage to his own farm was considerably worse. More than a year later he received a $50,000 settlement to help cover the destruction. When asked about a possible 1970 revival of the festival, he declined to rent his land again, saying he intended to go back to running a dairy farm.

Worn down by the ongoing conflict with his neighbors, Yasgur sold the 600-acre farm in 1971 to Charles and June Gelish and relocated to Marathon, Florida. He died there of a heart attack on February 9, 1973, at age 53. Rolling Stone magazine gave him a full-page obituary, a rare honor for someone outside the music industry. At his death his estate was estimated at around five million dollars, largely from the farm sale at roughly one thousand dollars per acre.

Yasgur's name became permanently linked to Woodstock through Joni Mitchell's song 'Woodstock,' which includes a line about 'going down to Yasgur's farm.' The rock band Mountain, who performed at the festival, recorded a tribute called 'For Yasgur's Farm' shortly afterward, and the Beastie Boys later sampled his festival speech on their 1989 album Paul's Boutique.

His story has also reached audiences through other media: actor Eugene Levy portrayed him in Ang Lee's film Taking Woodstock, and his son Sam wrote a biography titled Max B. Yasgur: The Woodstock Festival's Famous Farmer, published in 2009. In 1997 the land that included the festival site was bought by Alan Gerry and developed into the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, preserving the location's connection to the event Yasgur made possible.