The Woodstock Festival Historic site, listed on the National Register in 2017, encompasses 300 acres of rural farmland that were used for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, "three days of peace and music." The cultural landscape is dominated by a natural bowl, once one of dairy farmer Max Yasgur’s hay fields, and the surrounding land that was home to half a million young people between August 15 and August 17 (actually extending days before and after those dates) in 1969.

The Woodstock Festival is widely recognized as one of the most significant cultural events of the 1960s and came to symbolize the optimism, activism, and alternative lifestyles of the baby-boom generation. The festival featured many of the major musical acts of the era—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly & The Family Stone, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, and Creedence Clearwater Revival—but the festival took on universal meaning because of the response of the audience to the traffic, overcrowding, lack of food and proper sanitation, and torrential rains. Rising above the problems and without authorities to impose order, the audience members created an environment of peace, cooperation, and oneness. As farmer Max Yasgur said from the Woodstock stage, “You people have proven something to the world: that half a million young people can get together for three days of peace and music and have nothing BUT peace and music.”

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