So much about Winston Farm has always been big. Its farm name derives from a larger-than-life character who owned the farm. The history has involved huge and prized dairy cows, big winners in its trotting horses, the massive second Woodstock festival, and major development proposals that have engendered significant controversy over its destiny. The property’s natural history and ecology are hugely significant – it sits atop an immense aquifer, the Beaverkill Aquifer, and possesses hundreds of acres of long-standing hardwood forests.
If you walk through Winston Farm on the winding Augusta Savage Road and look around to the curving fields, meadows and woods, and to its now-in-disrepair bluestone mansion, you can experience its splendor and sense the many stories this land has held for a very long time. The Town of Saugerties is weighing an ambitious development proposal that a team of three developers and businessmen have proposed for Winston Farm. If built as they propose, it would vastly transform this area with a project that is as almost as large and involved as the Village of Saugerties, and its future would depart starkly from what has come before.
The developers – Randy Richers, Tony Montano and John Mullen – propose a multifaceted project that includes single- and multi-family housing, a technology park, an amphitheater, public trails, and camping.
Thus, it’s important to look at and appreciate Winston Farm’s long, significant, and fascinating history.
The present-day Winston Farm lies within a parcel of land that George Meals and Richard Hayes bought starting in 1685, one of three large plots that formed the heart of Saugerties – the Sawyerkill lands, the Beaverkill lands, and the area that lay on both sides of the Esopus Creek where it enters the Hudson River. The area where Winston Farm lies was largely rural for more than two centuries, a part of Saugerties known as Byrnes Corners, comprised of boarding houses, small homes, and hotels, according to A Brief History of Saugerties, a book by Michael Sullivan Smith, local historian, a former member of the town’s Historic Preservation Commission, and an artist. Byrnes Corners was situated at the crossroads where the King’s Road (Kings Highway) intersected with the road to Woodstock.
Getting things done
By the turn of the twentieth century, Saugerties contained a bustling village; ice harvesting, brick, and other industries, and newly installed electricity (electrification didn’t come to the rural areas around it until four decades later under the Franklin Roosevelt administration). In the Catskills, New York City was leveling, razing, and forever altering many small villages to dam the Esopus Creek and establish the Ashokan Reservoir. James Overton Winston, a civil engineer, and his brother Thomas became the chief construction contractors to oversee the building of the Ashokan Dam.
As it turned out, James O. Winston was not only the right person for this immense and crucial role, but one who channeled his prodigious ambitions, interests, brainpower, and drive into amassing and consolidating a farm of more than 1000 acres in Saugerties. In the second decade of the 20th century, Winston purchased the Rio Alto Stock Farm and other rural lands. By 1920, Winston owned a farm where he would breed Guernsey cows, train harness racehorses, and pursue farming practices that took advantage of the latest scientific methods. It was called the Winston Farm and later the Saugerties Farm.
Born in 1865, Winston was in his mid-40s when he started acquiring the farmlands. He had worked hard to reap financial and professional success from his early days in Virginia.
In the post-Civil War time of Winston’s childhood, his family’s fortunes had declined. His mother taught him to read and write, but he was unable to attend college. As a young adult working days as a commissary clerk and timekeeper on the Ohio River in Kentucky, he studied engineering texts at night, according to Bob Steuding’s book, The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir. Winston was a tall, dashing figure, with a commanding personality and an “obsession with getting things done,” as Steuding wrote.
As Winston cultivated his farming interests and developed the farm property, he was already a wealthy man. He became increasingly so from his construction contracting company’s business making highways, dams, railroads, aqueducts, reservoirs, and tunnels. Around 1920, he built a spacious bluestone mansion on the farm – known as Kings Mead – for him, his wife Bessie Harrison Winston, and their four children.
The architects for the 9000-square-foot mansion were Myron Teller and Gerard Betz. The house plans show a large entrance hall, terrace, pergola, and sun parlor on the first floor, ten bedrooms on the second floor, and lodgings on the third floor. On the property were small bluestone bridges and dams on streams, intended to model Ashokan Reservoir features, according to Sullivan Smith. Today, remnants of these features remain.
A model farm
The Winston Farm was a very large, complex farm operation, and its production and dairy breeding drew attention and accolades from far outside of the Hudson Valley. The farm’s Guernseys were breaking production records and earning agricultural awards. The Field Journal, in 1924, saluted the farm with a feature article citing “Saugerties Farms Guernsey, the Home of the Redoubtable Ultra May King.” Winston had purchased Ultra May King in 1916, and it became the farm’s herd bull, the one to be mated with mature cows. The sire’s 22 Advanced Register daughter-cows achieved high production: averaging 11,526.40 pounds of milk. In November, 1924, a Saugerties Farm ad touted “choice bull cows for sale” and its purchase of the female Shuttlewick Levity for a world record price of $22,000, to be bred to Ultra May King.
The Guernsey Breeders’ Journal, the longest-running publication of any American dairy breed organization, often detailed the farm’s breeding operations and successes. The March 1, 1921, issue featured the Saugerties Farm, calling it “one of the largest and best-kept stock and dairy farms of the Hudson River Valley.” (This information on the farm drawing notice for its production and quality comes from a very detailed presentation that the late Marti Randall, a historic preservationist, compiled in championing the designation of the Winston Farm as a historic landmark.) At its peak, the farm had 150 milking cows, plus bulls, dry cows, and young cattle. There were 29 standard bred horses on the farm in 1921, in addition to 50 sheep and at least 1200 chickens.
Winston’s farm also achieved success in training trotting horses, and for a time had a future sport Hall of Famer in the fold as trainer and farm manager. A Winston Farm trotter, Etta Druien, held the record for four-year-olds in 1924. Townsend Ackerman, the Winston Farm trainer, educated the trotter and rode her as a two- and three-year-old. In his early racing days, Ackerman rode other Winston Farm trotters to victories. The Ulster County native ultimately earned many achievements in the sport despite the loss of a leg as a child. He was inducted into the Harness Racing Hall of Fame in 1985.
The farm suffered losses during the Great Depression, but the Winstons held on, They were able to maintain a highly productive dairy farm well into the 1940s.
James O. Winston died in 1947. He, his wife Bessie, and two children are buried in Montrepose Cemetery in Kingston.
From dumpsite to Mudstock
Starting in the 1950s, a time of uncertainty and neglect ensued for the Winston Farm property, its high-flying days as a great farm forgotten. The Schaller family purchased the property in 1961. The decades since then have seen various proposals to develop the property, including a community college. Saugerties citizens have arisen to oppose various uses — particularly when an Ulster County agency first proposed a landfill/incinerator on the farm property in 1987.
The idea to place a dump or incinerator on these fields and forests sparked many in the community to coalesce in a wave of strong opposition. Out of a community meeting that drew a massive turnout, people formed committees and organized the Winston Farm Alliance. Step by step, the group fought the proposal to site a dump at Winston Farm. The opponents were able to derail the landfill.
A mural in the village, which artists Tor Gedmunsen, Kate Boyer, and Kurt Boyer created in the early 1990s, honors this community victory. It presents a vivid rendering of fields, the Catskills, the Esopus Creek delta, and the Hudson River. Atop it is a banner stating “Dump Here Never,” and underneath it are the words “Winston Farm Alliance.” Kelli Bickman touched up the artwork in 2016. For those who took part and many others who have learned later about this chapter, it represents a time of Saugerties standing up against a wholly inappropriate proposal for an important property.
In the early 1990s, as Saugerties reveled in its defeat of this ghastly landfill/incinerator proposal, an event came about that would become identified with the Winston Farm site: Woodstock ’94. As one reads publications today of the new development proposal, the headlines often do not refer to a truly historic Hudson Valley farm or a natural area with a stunning view of the Catskill Mountains. It’s known as the site of the Woodstock musical festival’s 25th anniversary in 1994. To be sure, Woodstock ‘94 was more than memorable, a festival that married some storied Sixties rockers of the original Woodstock with the grunge, hip-hop, techno, rave, and mosh pits of the early Nineties. Common to both festivals was the mud, so much so that some have referred to Woodstock ’94 as Mudstock ’94.
Originally scheduled for two weekend days – August. 13-14, 1994 – the organizers added Friday, August 12. Woodstock ’94 featured more than 50 musical acts, including original Woodstock returnees like Joe Cocker, Carlos Santana, and Country Joe McDonald and an eclectic range of others, such as Nine Inch Nails, Green Day, Primus, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Salt-N-Pepa, Melissa Etheridge, and Arrested Development.
Performers presented over two stages in fields apart enough not to interfere with each other’s sound. MTV provided lots of coverage. The plans called for admitting only ticketed concertgoers. However, many thousands crashed the gates and brought in food and alcoholic beverages.
While the weather Friday at Woodstock ’94 was hot and dry, rains came in Saturday afternoon and on Sunday the downpours continued, turning the music festival into an utter mudfest. There was mud moshing, sleeping in mud, throwing mud, and performing in mud. Nine Inch Nails went onstage caked in mud, and thanks to MTV’s live pay-per-view broadcast the performance was shown in millions of homes. Band member Trent Reznor’s mud-caked outfit is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame collection, according to Rolling Stone.
All in all, police estimated that 300,000 people attended Woodstock ’94. The mud that made for a raucous atmosphere had its downside: By the third day, doctors had treated some 7000 injuries at medical facilities on the site, the Washington Post reported. Still, some of the worst-case scenarios that some in Saugerties feared coming to the village didn’t materialize.
Long-form SEQRA coming
During the decades that Ferdinand and Marianne Schaller and their family owned the sprawling Winston Farm acreage – some 59 years from 1961 to 2020 – they entertained the varied proposals for the property that bubbled up. Occasionally, a proposal became a reality. Many others never did.
Ferdinand Schaller handled the negotiations with original 1969 Woodstock Festival co-creator Michael Lang. In 2016, Jeremy Schaller, Ferdinand and Marianne’s son and then-spokesman for the Schaller family, told the press that Winston Farm was “a very special place for us.” At that time, Jeremy Schaller expressed the family’s openness to rock entrepreneur Lang’s aim to establish an ongoing facility for midsized music festivals on the property. Ultimately, the Schallers’ involvement with this site ended with their sale after nearly six decades of ownership to the group now proposing the Winston Farm development, Mullen, Montano, and Richers.
What will happen with Winston Farm’s incredible historical stories and the character and natural history of this place in the future? Walking the Augusta Savage Road, Michael Sullivan Smith displays an encyclopedic knowledge of Saugerties and the farm’s past. He has compiled and continues work on an amalgam of Saugerties history through maps, sketches, photos, video and text. He would like to see Augusta Savage Road become an interpretive pathway so that others would learn of this farm and area’s history.
How will development impact the site’s environmental characteristics, wildlife habitat, ecosystems, and water resources? At a September public hearing on Winston Farm’s scoping document, public response ranged from enthusiasm for the development plans to outright opposition. Many urged more detailed analysis and impact assessments.
At the hearing, Emily Svenson, an environmental attorney speaking for Catskill Mountainkeeper, said the development as proposed “represents a fundamental change in the Town of Saugerties.” Mountainkeeper has focused mainly on water resources and wildlife habitat, asserting that a massive development risks irreversible environmental damage to the Beaverkill aquifer that could be crucial to Saugerties’ future drinking water needs. David Brennan, attorney for the developers, said at the hearing that there were areas of agreement between the developers and the issues that Svenson raised, “including the need for a thorough analysis and study of this project.”
Key to what ultimately happens at Winston Farm will be the analysis of environmental impacts that will happen as part of the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) process. The Saugerties town board issued a positive declaration in July as part of the SEQRA procedure, requiring extensive long-form environmental and technical analyses before the project can proceed. The public will have opportunities to review SEQR documents and provide input.
The SEQRA process will shape the destiny of the Winston Farm development proposal. Pondering the Winston Farm’s rolling and lush fields, forests, the now-in-disrepair still-magnificent bluestone mansion, the bluestone features and remnants on the property, the stream corridor, the vistas, and the curving road never quite updated to an automobile age, one can’t help but wonder what the next chapters of this historic and beautiful place will be.
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