Two weeks ago Marguerite Kearns’ celebration of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and that woman’s remarkable if little known importance to Woodstock history was important for several reasons, the most potent of which keeps alive the memory of our graciously obsessed Alf Evers — without whom Kearns’ inquiry would not have occurred at all, as Marguerite was first to admit. The article centrally posed one of those fascinating if fanciful questions, specifically: how different would Woodstock be today if Charlotte had not introduced Ralph Whitehead to Hervey White? Knowing a bit about the subject, Kearns’ speculation caused me to formulate the following response (which, without Marguerite’s article — itself indebted to Alf Evers — would also never have been formulated by me.)
Whitehead’s original “founding of creative Woodstock” in his mammoth 1902-03 building of “the art college” he called “Byrdcliffe,” didn’t depend on Hervey White, although White certainly enriched it.
It was Bolton Brown who “discovered” Woodstock, but Whitehead’s first meeting with this self-declared genius certainly had nothing to do with anyone but Bolton Coit Brown. Crucial to future Woodstock, however, it was Brown who insisted the Catskills best served the idea of Whitehead’s community enjoying both rustic isolation and proximity to a wealthy urban center where the future colony’s furniture and craft were to be sold. Further, it was famously Brown who braved wickedly thicketed woods and rattlesnakes to finally peer down at the tiny hamlet of Woodstock from atop of Mead’s Mountain “like Balboa ‘from his peak in Darien’” — instantly aware of the exact importance of what he surveyed.
However, without the pet protégé of Hervey White eagerly willing to replace Bolton Brown as Whitehead’s primary lieutenant in the planning, building, and running of his “art college,” Whitehead would have tended to be more patient with the nakedly ambitious Brown, and Byrdcliffe would have become a formidable, if more conservative, creative locus. Contrarily, the fact that a tall, handsome, and more socially adept Herman Dudley Murphy soon “replaced” Brown as head art teacher at Byrdcliffe, naturally, hampers this notion. While Bolton Brown’s wife, the universally admired “Lucy Brown” would also have weighed more heavily into the equation. Nevertheless, the autocratic if basically dilettantish Mr. Whitehead and the humorlessly determined Mr. Brown would certainly have come to a parting of the ways sooner or later.
But without Hervey White’s radical tolerance slowly finding its feet at his “Maverick Colony,” history would also find missing his long-prevailing “Maverick Festival.” It became the unique and vital “art engine” fueling the community while rendering a millionaire like Whitehead not only unnecessary but authoritatively destructive. And so without Hervery’s crucial collision of poverty-based art, free-thinking, and yes, free love, Woodstock never would have become synonymous with such, nor would the far-faster intermarriage of local farmers and artists have occurred without the bacchanalian wooing-party of the Maverick Festival.
Yet to fairly play the game of “what if” we need to also acknowledge the following.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, although not as deeply entrenched as Hervey White at Chicago’s “Hull House,” (the Woodstock importance of which deserves an article all its own) — did indeed live with “Brother White” in a new Hull House settlement fondly called “Little Hell,” while sharing the unhappiness of each vainly loving the same man. The point is Charlotte was fully capable of fulfilling much the same role played by Hervey in Byrdcliffe in bringing from Hull House a boardinghouse (“The Lark’s Nest”) full of powerhouse women. (Without as likely inviting from Chicago University Martin Schutze and his pioneering photographer for a wife Eva Watson-Schutze, so we wouldn’t have Eva’s extraordinary photographs of early Byrdliffe, nor the Historical Society of Woodstock as early as 1929, founded by Martin.)
In fact, without artists, writers, and musicians being wooed away by the excitement (and ironically, the more austere concentration) of The Maverick, “Byrdcliffe” would certainly not have become known locally as “bored stiff” because the actual genius of the place, best exampled by renaissance woman Zulma Steele and her ingenious partner Edna Walker, would have shown forth more brightly. For it was Steele and Walker who fashioned stencils based on local fauna next sumptuously painted (by Steele) stenciled, embossed, and carved into Byrdcliffe furniture. Even Bolton Brown admitted Zulma Steele to be great talent of the place (beneath himself, of course.) But Steele and Walker were each culled from Pratt and provided scholarships by Whitehead, himself. (Curiously, they remain unmentioned in Hervey White’s autobiography — but that’s another story.)
Gifted lesbians Wilna Hervey and Nan Mason would still have come to Woodstock and become loved and accepted by the town’s natives. Whitehead’s moneyed friends would still have come and built in “East and West Riding,” including Ben Webster who designed and had constructed Bob Dylan’s future home. Such riches would most certainly have included the Blue Dome School’s Saphic Empress Dewing Woodward and her partner Louise Johnson, and so their revolutionary insertion of “the nude” into “the landscape” would still have shaken up our conservative art colony.
Co-founder of Hull House, Ellen Gates Starr would have brought book-binding and design to Byrdcliffe, Bertha Thompson would have introduced her pottery to the place (with both Mr. and Mrs. Whitehead falling in love the form), and the diminutive Kentuckian, Marie Little, would certainly brought her weaving (another love of the Whiteheads) and the playing of what is likely to have been Woodstock’s first guitar.
Now, whether or not Rennie Cantine’s guitar sculptures would today adorn our streets becomes a thornier question. One argument contends: if something like the Woodstock Festival could have been inspired by something like the Sound-Outs (across from what was then Peter Pan Farm), none of it could have happened in or been attributed to Woodstock. For without Hervey’s Maverick Festivals, which in turn inspired the “Sound Outs,” Woodstock Nation would’ve been known by a different name. The other argument follows history even more closely. Bob Dylan (whose Woodstock fame resulted in the influx of musicians here) first came to town “woodshedding” with Peter Yarrow in the Yarrow cabin, the ruins of which sit at eastern base of Hill 99. Now Yarrow has never answered the question as to whether or not his family first lived in the “Yarrow” bungalow found at the Maverick circa the twenties and thirties. If so, then “without” the Maverick, the Yarrows wouldn’t have eventually settled inside the Woodstock township. However, if the Yarrows first came to the area on their own, then Dylan, “the heavy” Albert Grossman, and the eventual Woodstock Festival might indeed not have been welcomed here, though Michael Lang would, yes, have used the name for his three days of peace and love in Bethel anyway. So Hey! Peter Yarrow — answer up!
In conclusion, if Charlotte hadn’t introduced Hervey White to Ralph Whitehead, Woodstock would likely be the home to Emma Goldman University (whose favorite niece was Stella Ballantine of Ballantine Hill) or that university might have borne the name Charlotte Perkins Gilman (whose full herstory remains beyond the extraordinary). Either way — to be perfectly truthful — I’ve always felt exactly such an institution is what this town most sorely lacks.
[Note: Numerous “men important to Byrdcliffe” have been conspicuously and most unfairly left out of the above, and — to remain concise — I have sometimes assigned the foremost talents of a certain art or craft as the progenitor of such at Byrdcliffe. In other words the actual history is far more complex.]++Tad Wise is a song-writer, novelist, and historian who will — when a publisher manifests who’ll actually pay him for it — finally finish The Maverick’s Maverick, his definitive biography of Hervey White.
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