Our Place in the Country: Five Decades in Woodstock, New York

In 1970, when I was sixteen years old, my father, Irwin Touster, purchased a piece of property in Mount Tremper, New York, eight miles down the Wittenberg Road from the town of Woodstock. The place had an old farm house, a huge yellow barn, a swimming pond, a stream, and almost four acres of land. 

Dad rented out the house, and set up his studio and living quarters in the barn’s hayloft, turned two horse stalls into bedrooms for guests, and one into a bathroom that he outfitted with a chemical toilet purchased at Sears. The bats, mice, and all the other critters who made their home in the woods became his roommates and constant companions.

There was no heat or running water in the barn, so baths were taken in the pond. My father was insistent that the chemical toilet was for number two only, so the great outdoors was our always available urinal. When we needed to wash, shower, or do the dishes a hose would be set up in the sun, heating up water when it was called for. He checked out 16mm films from the Woodstock Library, set up his projector in the barn's hayloft, and projected the film through the large open barn doors onto a screen set up outside. We had a stove and electricity, but most of our dinners were cooked on an outdoor charcoal grill.

My father created art and lived in that barn every summer for the next 46 years. When living there became too difficult for him, he stopped renting out the house, and we turned the spread into our family compound.

I was living in Boston, and my brother was in California, so I was the natural choice to become caretaker of the property. Besides, my brother never felt as comfortable in Woodstock as I did. My father would often say about his sons, “When Josh comes to Woodstock the first thing he does is put on his hiking boots and climbs a mountain. When David comes, the first thing he does is check the schedule to see when the next bus back to the city leaves.”

Once a month, year round, I would drive down to New York and pick up my dad to drive him to Woodstock. It took some time for him to embrace living in the farm house, and not the barn, but as he grew older he did just that. He was having a hard time with his balance, and walked with a cane, so I would help him up to the pond and we would sit around the table, him with a diet Coke, me with a beer, and chatted and took in the property that was so special to both of us.

As time went on, the place went from being our dad's to being our family's, and then to being mine. I think my father embraced and encouraged this. 

I had always documented our life in Woodstock via my photography, but as my father grew older, and I began to anticipate the end drawing nearer, I photographed more and more, needing to hold on to and capture a time and place that will always be so dear to both me and my Dad.

The photographs in this section were shot on our property over a twelve-year period, between the time my father stopped summering in Woodstock, and the time we sold the place in 2018. 

-Joshua Touster

(Click on thumbnail to enlarge image, and to view artwork data)