Tree That Relayed Woodstock Messages Has Come Down

Masses of people at the 1969 Woodstock festival stopped by the towering red maple tree a little ways off from the main stage. Many scrawled messages on paper scraps or cardboard and attached them to the old tree's trunk. "SUSAN, MEET YOU HERE SATURDAY 11 A.M., 3 P.M. or 7 P.M.," read one note left on what later became known as the Message Tree. In another, Candi Cohen was told to meet the girls back at the hotel. Dan wrote on a paper plate to Cindy (with the black hair & sister) that he was sorry he was "too untogether" to ask for her address but left his number. Fifty-five years after Woodstock, the Message Tree was cut down under rainy skies Wednesday due to its poor health and safety concerns.

The owners of the concert site were reluctant to lose a living symbol of the community forged on a farm in Bethel, New York, on Aug. 15-18, 1969. But operators of the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts feared that the more than 100-year-old tree was in danger of falling down. They have plans to honor its legacy. In an age before cellphones, the 60-foot tree by the information booth helped people in the festival's sea of humanity connect with each other. Hitch noted that it has since stood as a tangible link to the historic event that drew more than 400,000 people to Max Yasgur's dairy farm some 80 miles northwest of New York City over the rainy, chaotic weekend.

"This tree, literally, is in almost every picture that someone took of the stage—looking down from the top of the hill, the tree's in the bottom corner," said Neal Hitch of the Museum at Bethel Woods. The on-site museum has some of the surviving messages, and Bethel Woods is seeking proposals to create works of art using the wood. Those works will be exhibited next year at the museum. The site also has several saplings made from grafts from the Message Tree. Bethel Woods at some point will host a regenerative planting ceremony, and one of those trees could be planted at the site. "There's this symbolism of planting something that will be the Message Tree for the next generation," Hitch said.

(More Woodstock stories.)