For 19th century Woodstockers, Grant’s visit to their mountain was a seminal moment of recognition. His stay may have been brief but here was validation and birth as Woodstock began the transition from industries that took from the land — such as quarrying and tanning — to an economy and lifestyle based on what others saw in the land.
When Ralph and Mary Adamucci began selling vegetables out of their farmstand in 1919, they probably had no intention of building a Hudson Valley grocery and nursery dynasty.
A letter to my family (which hopefully inspires you to create yours).
The Catskills mark the northern edge of Appalachia, a region with a 37 percent higher mortality rate for “diseases of despair”—suicide, alcohol and drug overdose—than the rest of the country.
If I only fished to capture fish, my fishing trips would have ended long ago.
The 1918 pandemic killed as many people in one year as the Black Death claimed in a century. But it generated surprisingly few headlines at the time. The pandemic’s casualties blurred together in the public mind with those who never returned from the great European bloodbath, which perhaps explains why Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing best-selling novels in the years immediately following the Spanish flu pandemic, never mentioned the disease even once. Moreover, the pandemic lacked a punchy name.
Pia Öste-Alexander, artist, activist, matriarch, and proud Woodstocker, died in her Wittenberg home after a brief illness on New Year’s Day at the age of 86.
Although it sometimes seems Woodstock has ridden the coat-tails of what didn’t happen here more than what did, the town has indeed been graced with several geniuses, two of whom endured allegations of “imposter!” and taught the world much through such endurance.
Whether you head off to Woodstock’s big community center Thanksgiving or go to friends’ and/or family’s private tables, be sure to raise a glass to Levon and the other fallen heroes. Be sure to invite those still living. And don’t forget the chestnuts!
Breaking the Code is the most audacious — if modest — production in PAW’s illustrious history.