History.com: Woodstock 1969: How a Music Festival That Should've Been a Disaster Became Iconic Instead

Fifty years later, people are still trying to match the bizarre accident that was Woodstock '69. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair began on August 15, 1969, as half a million people gathered on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York. Billed as "An Aquarian Experience: 3 Days of Peace and Music," the epic event would later be known simply as Woodstock and become synonymous with the counterculture movement of the 1960s.