On the ground that I was there from the beginning, I have been asked to write something about the early days
at Woodstock. I am glad to do this but here give notice that I shall not write as a historian and comprehensively, with dates and confirmations; I shall write simply some personal memories that come to me when I think of those times.
It is true that I was there before the colony was; in fact, it was I that brought the colony to Woodstock. The primary idea of the thing, however, came from Whitehead, who also furnished the money. He would be the natural one to write this article, but since he has been dead some years, and since Hervey White declined, when I put it to him. I will myself, as I have said, set down a few memories.
Ralph Radcliffe-Whitehead was an English gentleman, graduate of Oxford, friend of Win. Morris and Ruskin, the ideas of whom influenced him. He inherited a water faucet that flowed money whenever he turned it on. He lived in Santa Barbara and his age, when he comes into his tale, was fifty-two. His wife was from an old Philadelphia family and they had two young sons. Whitehead was small rather than large, thin rather than fat, had a nervous temperament and an amiable social manner. The impulse to establish a colony of artists had been with him for many years. As he thought of it, it seemed as if he would like to live there. "Artists" he once remarked, "are the only people in the world worth living with, and the most difficult."
I had a home in Palo Alto, and functioned as a professor in Stanford University. One day, thirty years ago, a gentleman appeared in our sitting room, stranger to me, but who presently became this man Whitehead. Art in general and art in particular we discussed and in the end there emerged this colony notion. When we had sounded each other out and came down to cases, he revealed that it was his desire to try to put this idea into effect, somewhere in the east, and offered me a salary to help get it going. His first figure I declined, as also his double of it; but when he tripled it, I accepted. Ours was purely a gentleman's agreement; no papers were drawn. Time and money were verbally agreed upon and our general objective, that was all.
The question to be considered first was, where might we best locate; and Whitehead, thinking of a personal residence, laid it down that we must be in the country and at least fifteen hundred feet above sea level. "And I won't go to the Catskills," he declared, "they are full of Jews." He gave his vote for Asheville, N. C., which I rejected with energy, laying it down in my turn that we must be near the centre of population and civilization,in a word, near the great cities in the northeastern corner of the United States. And I pointed out that of these cities, New York was to be preferred and that the only land fifteen hundred feet high near this town was the Catskills.
Hervey White was a young man in those daysvery much the poetlong hair, whiskers, no hat, red necktie, and strong for radicalism in every form. The under dog was always right, with Hervey. He graduated from Harvard, but is far prouder of hailing from a ranch in Kansas. Whitehead being fond of Hervey made him a guest and sort of companion. So Whitehead said, "All right: Hervey and I will go south and see what we can find and you go north and see what you can find. We will keep in touch and decide about our location later." Exactly so: I sold my Palo Alto property, boxed my stuff, took the wife and three babies on the overland train for the east. I remember that after we had left Buffalo and were roaring through the forests east of it, out of the car windows we saw the floor of the woods sparkling with the yellow blossoms of adder's tongue. This was in the spring of 1902.
My ancestral home is up in Schuyler County. To it I now took my family and there left them. I went down to the town of Catskill. I provided myself with the government Geological Survey maps of the entire region that includes the Catskill Mountains. A stage took me up the northern side of the range to Windham. To describe my operations from this point would require a book, not an article. Sometimes I traveled by horse and buggy, but quite as often on my feet. Much of the country I explored was without roads or even paths, and it was by virtue of my contour maps that I was able to go, afoot and alone, over the highest ridges and mountains in the group. I scrambled over summits so wild it seemed no man or even animal could ever have been there. Some were flat table rock, covered everywhere with dry gray dead moss a foot thick, the same gray moss hanging in sad festoons from all the branches of the few stunted spruce trees that barely survived. I am an old hand at mountain work, having served my apprenticeship in the wildest of the California Sierra, but for sheer savage impenetrability and utter laboriousness some of these Catskill trips really capped my experience. I tore and ripped my clothes, on one occasion, to an extent that forced me, on regaining the region of farms, to borrow a threaded needle and retire with it round the corner of the house and sew myself up before I could meet people.
As the crow flies, the Catskills are only some twenty-five miles across, but I used up three entirely laborious weeks zigzagging back and forth and plunging up and down in them. I got in a high pocket with steep walls, in its bottom a single minute farm. The man said the name of the place was Mink Hollow. South of this hollow, the map showed that the steep wall terminated in a narrow and high ridge. Still south of this spruce-crested ridge, across a valley, the map gave Mt. Overlook a lake appearing off to the east. Lakes being scarce and desirable, I scrambled some miles down to this one, only to find it no lake at all but merely one of the Kingston reservoirsnamed, however, Cooper's Lake. The day being still young I walked up the back side of Overlook, emerging into the notch at Mead's Mountain House.
Exactly here the story of modern Woodstock really begins, for it was just at this moment and from this place that I, like Balboa from his "peak in Darien," first saw my South Sea. South indeed it was and wide and almost as blue as the sea, that extraordinarily beautiful view, amazing in extent, the silver Hudson losing itself in remote haze, those farthest and faintest humps along the horizon being the Shawangunk Mountains. I walked slowly along the highway facing this panorama, passed by the porch of the Mountain House, and a little down the road came upon an old man with a white beard doing something over in an apple orchardall the trees in full blossom. I climbed the stonewall and talked with him. He registered surprise and disapprobation at my coming "alone" over those mountains back of Mink Hollow. It was very dangerous, he said. He did not know he was talking to a chap that had climbed Mt. Shasta, "alone." I was rude to his mountains, I confess, for I said: "These are the littlest mountains I have ever seen."
My old man was Mr. Mead himself, who had built the place forty years before. Pointing down to what seemed an earthly paradise, stretched at our feet, I asked: "What is the name of that place down there?" He replied: "That is Woodstock Village." It looked good to me then; it has not ceased to do so.
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