Who Cleaned Up After Woodstock ‘69?

The three-day Woodstock Music and Arts Fair, featuring iconic performances from 1960s legends like The Who, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, was held on Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York, from August 15 through August 18, 1969.

Woodstock’s young organizers expected 50,000 to 100,000 attendees, but nearly half a million showed up. By all accounts, Woodstock should have been a disaster—not enough food and water, overwhelmed portable toilets, rainstorms and mud—but the ethos of peace and love prevailed, and Woodstock became the seminal gathering of the Flower Power generation.

Rona Elliot was there in 1969. She was a 22-year-old public relations liaison for the Woodstock crew who later became a music journalist.

“I've been doing oral histories [with Woodstock attendees] for 56 years, and it's rare to find someone who doesn't say it changed their life,” says Elliot. “So something happened.”

The Woodstock experience may have been transformative, but when hundreds of thousands of blissfully exhausted festivalgoers stumbled home on Monday morning, they left behind an epic mess. “It looked like a war zone,” says Elliot.

Yasgur’s once-verdant cow pasture was reduced to a muddy field strewn with garbage and debris as far as the eye could see. There were piles of mud-caked sleeping bags, abandoned shoes and shirts, flattened tents and lots of beer cans. And like everything else at Woodstock, there wasn’t a clear plan for how it was all going to get cleaned up.

Nearly 50 years later, however, when archaeologists with the Museum at Bethel Woods conducted test excavations at the former festival site, they expected to find tons of valuable Woodstock detritus left behind. Instead, they only recovered a handful of pull tabs and some broken glass.

“The cleanup was very effective,” says Neal Hitch, the museum’s director. “People say it looked like a Civil War battlefield, which it did the day after. But how did we get from those photographs taken on Tuesday [August 19, 1969] to where we are today, where we dug 800 test pits and found 10 pieces of garbage? It's just not there.”

It’s clear that somebody conducted a very thorough cleanup after Woodstock in 1969, but who?

After Jimi Hendrix played the final musical set on Monday morning, Chip Monck took the stage. Monck was hired to do the lighting for Woodstock, but at the last minute, producer Michael Lang asked him to double as emcee. Monck introduced most of the bands at Woodstock and issued the famous “brown acid” warnings, but his closing remarks to the roughly 40,000 people remaining in the crowd included a friendly plea.

“We’ve got one little last trip we’d like to lay on you, if it’s at all possible,” Monck said. “There’s a couple of packages of garbage bags here. If, on your way out, you wouldn’t mind taking one, filling it up, and leaving it where you fill it, that would certainly be appreciated.”

There was a strong volunteer spirit at Woodstock. Some attendees missed out on the musical performances because they volunteered to cook food at the popup kitchens run by the Hog Farm collective. The same went for garbage collection. A lot of people heeded Monck’s call.

At the end of Woodstock, the Oscar-winning 1970 documentary about the festival, there’s a wide shot of a trash-strewn field showing dozens of people carrying green plastic garbage bags. A young woman in a flowered shirt and woven headband bends down to pick up a muddy hunk of watermelon. A shirtless man spears a blanket with a stick and tosses it onto a pile.

Some of those volunteers even stuck around long after the rest of the Woodstock attendees trundled home. One of them was David Fillingham, whose parents bought Woodstock tickets for him and his girlfriend. On Monday morning, David called them to say he wasn’t going to be home for a while.

“We stayed through Hendrix and then we stayed for three weeks helping to clean up,” said Fillingham in an oral history collected by the Museum at Bethel Woods. Fillingham said there were about 300 other unpaid volunteers who stayed on to clear debris from the field, which was much appreciated by the farm’s owner. “[Max] Yasgur provided food for everybody. So, we had sandwiches and, you know, all kinds of stuff.”

When Lang, the 24-year-old producer co-creator of Woodstock, took off in a helicopter for New York City on Monday afternoon, he looked down to see a giant peace sign on the ground made of garbage.

Not everybody on the Woodstock cleanup crew worked for free. The festival’s organizers, Woodstock Ventures, contracted with local sanitation companies to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Joe Sardonia grew up just a few miles from the Woodstock festival site, and his father was one of those paid contractors. Sardonia worked on his dad’s Woodstock cleanup crew and remembers combing the grounds for anything salvageable.

“What we would do is line up in a row along one side of the field and walk across the field and pick up everything we came to,” Sardonia told the Museum at Bethel Woods. “There was all kinds of stuff... everything from tents to sleeping bags to clothes. [P]eople lost purses that had their information in them, which we tried to turn in and wallets with money... [Y]ou can tell the kids from New York City because their stuff was a mess all over the place.”

In Woodstock: The Oral History, Woodstock’s director of operations, Mel Lawrence said that the cleanup crews retrieved truckloads of muddy sleeping bags, blankets and clothes, and brought them down to the Salvation Army in New York City. Lisa Law, a photographer and filmmaker who spearheaded the Hog Farm’s improvised feeding operation at Woodstock, also remembers a massive salvage effort afterward.

“They gave us a tractor with a trailer and we drove it around, and people would throw this stuff into the trailer,” says Law, who recalls an eye-popping figure of 35,000 sleeping bags. “Some other groups [at Woodstock] took those and washed them and gave them away.”

Hitch of the Museum at Bethel Woods says that he’s heard similar accounts of thousands of wet sleeping bags being sent to New York, but he’s never seen photos or other documentation of truckloads of salvaged Woodstock leftovers being cleaned and donated.

“There are stories about shoes being picked up and sent back to New York and being distributed,” says Hitch. “There's also a story about a giant open pit that was on fire and people were throwing garbage in it that burned for several days. But we've dug between 800 and 900 test pits and we’ve never come across something like a pit full of burned garbage.”

One explanation for the surprising absence of Woodstock-related garbage at the festival site is that the whole place was probably bulldozed.

Chip Monck, the lighting guy-turned-emcee, remembers that the cleanup crew was “blessed with two small ‘Cats’ [Caterpillar bulldozers] and we just started resurfacing the field.”

At first, the bulldozers assisted with pushing the debris into piles, as seen in this photo of an unidentified man (wearing a groovy cowboy hat) corralling an assemblage of discarded crates, tarps and sleeping bags. But as Monck remembered, the bulldozers were eventually used to scrape an entire layer from the top of the field and resurface it.

Jean Nichols, another Hog Farm member, said that the Hog Farm was responsible for reseeding Yasgur’s alfalfa field, which couldn’t have been fully restored without heavy machinery.

“There was no chance that a group of us could actually clean that field,” Nichols recounted in Woodstock – Peace, Music & Memories. “I think they had to come in with backhoes and bury everything before they could reseed it and put it back to its pristine condition.”

Archaeologists came to a similar conclusion when they conducted a thorough investigation of the festival site in 2019. Using metal detectors, they didn't get many “hits” in the main field, but they located a scattering of buried metal debris clustered at the bottom of the field near the former site of the Woodstock stage.

“This accords well with eyewitness accounts of trash being bulldozed down the hill and loaded into trucks for removal,” concluded the archaeological report. “Festival goers left an immense amount of trash scattered over this area, which was cleared by bulldozing the trash (and probably a few inches of grass and soil) down the hill to be carried off site.”

A month after Woodstock, a reporter for the Village Voice drove up to Bethel to see what remained at the site where the musical magic happened. Parked on Hurd Road, the country lane that ran past Yasgur’s farm, the reporter described “[p]iles of garbage up and down the hillside, one still smoldering. Alfalfa — greenness — struggling back to dominate most of the amphitheater.”

Clearly, there was still work to be done at Yasgur’s farm a month after Woodstock, but that was only one of many sites in Bethel that were impacted by the festival. When throngs of Woodstock attendees were unable to find campsites at the overcrowded concert, they parked their cars and pitched their tents wherever they could, including the fields of neighboring farms. While some local farmers accommodated the uninvited guests, others were livid about their fenceposts being torn down for firewood, their crops being pillaged for food and all the garbage left behind.

Woodstock Ventures set aside an escrow fund to repay property owners for damages, but it also contracted with people like Joe Sardonia’s dad to collect Woodstock-related garbage from anywhere within at least a 5-mile radius of the festival site. The article in the Village Voice reported, “A garbage truck rumbled by, loaded to above the brim with filled green bags of garbage—the green bags passed around the audience enthusiastically a few weeks before. Along the sides of Hurd Road and the other roads in the area was more garbage.”

Sardonia told the Museum at Bethel Woods that it took months to finish picking up all the garbage created by Woodstock.

“We basically cleaned up all along Route 17B, all the fields around the site, and I had to go back to school, but I would work after school and on the weekends,” said Sardonia. “All I know is it took forever because we worked from the end of the festival until Christmas.”

The volunteers and contractors who cleaned up after Woodstock did such a thorough job that visitors to the Museum at Bethel Woods will find only one exhibit containing real garbage from Woodstock. The priceless stash of historic trash includes plastic bread bags, Styrofoam cups, an empty bag of pretzels and a can of Vienna sausages.

“It's exactly the weird assortment of things that an 18-year-old would buy at the gas station when they need food for three days,” says Hitch. “Ding Dongs, pretzels and Vienna sausages? We should be good.”