In the early days of bluestone quarrying, as the landscape of Saugerties inexorably shifted ton by ton down the river the wetlands and meadows nested between rocky ridges, prized for dairy cattle grazing, were expanded as a consequence. The rubble left from the quarrying was spread and covered with the the soil overburden always set aside for reclaiming the land. Today a level field that does not support tall growth is a sign that an extremely early quarry shared that land's use.

A high mound of loose stone fragments near the face of a cliff means sharing the land was no longer a concern. That was the result of the quarries economic success. The act of quarrying had so discouraged the traditional herding of cattle into the woodland meadows that it could not be practiced. There was no longer a reason to reclaim the land.

In the earliest days the countryside still used every acre to feed the industrial village. But when money was to be made from the small plots where the quarryman's family lived and fed themselves that reason for farming declined. Soon the land use had reverted to what it had been in colonial times, only the large tracts of open field grazing no longer had the upland commons to rotate their herds into when the winter hay crop was fenced. In the 1890's a large farm in Saugerties could only be afforded by those that could hire workers and buy fodder.

These were the gentleman farms. Brightbank was one under John Main's tenure and had enough families living there to make up the population of a countryside hamlet. Stroomzeit under the residency of Pidgeon, then Myers and then Hilton was a similar caprice. Valley Farm of Martin Cantine employed dozens whose families lived right in the village next to his factory workers. And the Washburn brothers joined the trend with farms run on their brickmaking profits in Flatbush, over Barclay Heights, and toward Woodstock at the 300 acre Shagbark Farm.

These farms were all pastoral retreats where their owners dabbled in dairy because grazing cattle gave the open fields that allowed them to feel the expanse of their land. The most expansive one of all, with over a thousand acres right in the heart of the township, was Saugerties Farms of James Overton Winston, or, the Winston Farm.

The rural identity of the part of Saugerties where the Winston Farm is located was Byrnes Corners, a hamlet of small residences, boarding houses and hotels clustered where they took advantage of the scenic panorama of the Catskill Mountains spread out over the open fields that had been there since colonial days. Today the setting has not changed looking west from the Thruway overpass bridge. Byrnes Corners was the crossroads community where the Kings Highway met the road to Woodstock and it ceased to exist in 1951 when the New York State Thruway’s pair of north and south toll plaza's and maintenance areas at Exit 20 rerouted or removed everything.

The Thruway covered not just what was Byrnes Corners but a sizable chunk of the best of the haying fields of Saugerties Farm. The delicate balance of water, grazing and harvest feed of a dairy farm was destroyed and the formula Saugerties Farm made work for its large herds was no longer practical, just like so many other farms that the Thruway displaced by its claiming, absorbing or dividing of their land.

J. O. Winston was an engineer. His company had been the principal contractor for constructing the dams and dikes of the Ashokan Reservoir. This work employed hundreds of horses and mules he had brought from his native Virginia and his initial purchase of the Rio Alto Stock Farm in January of 1912 was to buy the facilities he'd leased for wintering these animals. When he bought the adjacent Buffett lands that June, these two became the core of what would grow into the present 840+ acre “Winston Farm”. He continued to add adjoining purchases and by 1920 Winston had consolidated the largest block of land under one title in the Town of Saugerties.

When Winston found Saugerties in the early teens there was a lively society of “scientific” farmers established in its large estates. Edwin Cadwell, a financier from Wall Street, had been experimenting with breeding Guernseys at the Shagbark in the herds that George W. Washburn had assembled there to stock the many farms the Washburn family owned. Scientific agriculture was the intellectual reason for retiring to ones country seat at the turn of the century. It was the age when even the most modest estate had a greenhouse prominently placed in view of its entrance to show off this level of sophistication.

J. O. Winston found Saugerties a place in the country where there was an understanding of his pursuits and he found the land he had purchased perfect for an engineering approach to experiments with breeding and also production environments. He sat up residence and within a decade his Guernseys were breaking records for milk production, his fowl breeding had created the capon and his trotters were major winners on the harness racing circuit. Winston's farm was on the itinerary of royalty and heads of state as America’s showcase for the merits of scientific agriculture for over two decades.

When Winston first took up permanent residence on the farm he was still publishing a newspaper in Virginia and fulfilling civil engineering contracts for dams throughout the northeast. In the early 20's he had the 9,000 square foot mansion house, Kingsmead, designed and built by architects Teller and Betz as his center of operations. It had a dormitory where his apprentices were housed and studios where they drew up his projects. There was a large ball room and lounge for entertaining clients and visiting dignitaries. This house was built entirely of bluestone and the grounds that surrounded it were landscaped with bluestone bridges, walls, and damed streams made as miniature replicas of his Ashokan reservoir. The sesquicentennial of the Revolutionary War's burning of Kingston was organized in Kingsmead in 1927.

Winston's farm is completely underlaid with channels and piping for distributing the water from the natural hillside drainage to the many barns, stock pens and field troughs. At the time he purchased the property there were many independent structures as homes and barns of the farms he bought up and all of these were connected to his intricate supply network. This perfectly engineered living and pasture environment and its raised production and quality gave the farm an international reputation by the mid- 1920's and for the next thirty years its facilities housed large populations of tenants well before the first sub developments appeared.

This land had a reputation for historic significance well before Winston's contributions. J. O. Winston’s earliest purchases were within one of the first land grants in the Saugerties area; the Meales and Hayes Beaverkill part of their 1687 patent; which extends over 262 acres of rolling fields under the east face of the Hoogebergs.

This land has continually attracted owners of distinction over the centuries. The earliest was Evert Wynkoop, purported to be of the John Wincop (Johannas Wynkoop) family involved in earliest settlement of the Hudson Valley as recipient of a 1619 land patent in the “north Virginia” for the Separatists from the Church of England (these were the Puritans redirected to Massachusetts). In 1719 Evert Wynkoop purchased the middle section of the Beaverkill patent. The first Wynkoop house built here, dated to 1727, is a National, State and Local landmark stone house. It graces the entrance to the Winston Farm and is the first thing seen exiting the southbound Thruway toll booth at Saugerties.

Another deed, once part of the Winston Farm but now on land under the Thruway lanes, is to the land of John Minqua, reputed to be the Mohawk Indian who was one of the four chiefs representing the tribal federation of New York before Queen Anne in 1710 when land was promised to the Palatines in their Schoharie territory. There is an actual document and a reference to the person and location and it is one of the few such designations of property rights to an Native American but this connection to the chief that was received by Queen Anne is unproven. There are, however, artifacts unearthed throughout the Winston Farm that prove prehistoric habitation there as far back as 10,000 BC.

This land is at the merging of the long trail out of the Woodstock Valley with the ancient Lenne Lenope route between the Delaware basin and the Mohawk Valley. Some of the earliest European settlement can be found along these foot paths. By 1705 they had become wagon roads and highways. As the Kings Highway this was the most traveled road between the colonies and Albany, the traditional place where all Indian treaties were negotiated. There is scarcely a name in American History that did not pass this place in colonial times and during and after the Revolution.

J. O. Winston suffered losses during the Great Depression and his son, Randolph, recovered the farm in a bankruptcy sale, and incorporated it as Saugerties Farm under which it functioned as as a highly productive dairy farm up to the late 1940’s and the arrival of the Thruway. The majority of the land was kept intact through periods of speculation in placing a country club, a golf course, a community college, and a resource recovery facility, all uses based on its latter twentieth century identity as a large tract with an interstate highway interchange right at its front door.

Kingsmead was sectioned off with 100 acres to become a country club in the early 1950's and Robert Trent Jones, a world famous golf course designer bought the remaining 700 acres in 1956. But all the land had returned to Winston in foreclosures by the late 50's and, having sold all the dairy herds and milk processing equipment, it was sold for a fraction of its previous value in 1963. Afterward local farmers religiously hayed its fields every season to keep it from overgrowing.

In 1969, after several “sound-out” performances on a small farm on the Glasco Turnpike a similar event was attempted for the larger fields of the Winston Farm. An intractable reaction sent this to a less relevant location and this became the famous Woodstock Festival. For its twenty-fifth anniversary, in 1994, the Winston Farm was conceptualized as a permanent concert venue and given a permit to have this concert, primarily because a position in opposition to the Winston Farm's selection as a county dump site was stated by this permit. The event attracted 350,000 over a three day weekend but after the dump threat disappeared the fund for supporting the permanent concert venue also disappeared.

The 9,000 square foot Winston mansion house designed by architect Gerard Betz around elements of an original Wynkoop bluestone house is listed by the New York State department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation as a structure of historic and architectural significance and eligible for National Register designation. The overall farm has one of the last remaining roads consistently represented on maps, from the earliest, that has never been improved for the automobile. This road is used as an address for grave sites listed by the United States for officers of the Revolutionary War and the whole Winston Farm is listed as archaeologically sensitive for the many artifacts of Native American significance located there.

The Winston Farm is one of the great conundrums of Saugerties. Despite its overwhelming presence as a culturally significant place there has never been the will to officially recognize the fact. The same thing happened with Opus 40 with the suggestion that it be maintained as a park. The lighthouse went through the same dismissal when in the late 1960's it was offered to the community by the federal government after its decommissioning. The mystery is not so much that the responsibility goes unrecognized by decision makers as it is that the benefit to the community is so obvious to the community even as those that have volunteered to take the responsibility on are taken for granted.