MONTICELLO, NY — Sam Yasgur, the former Sullivan County attorney who left the post in January, passed away on June 23, after a long battle with cancer. He was 74 years old.

Aside from being the Sullivan County attorney for 10 years, Sam was also a district attorney in Manhattan for 27 years and served as attorney for Westchester County.

Sam was the son of Max Yasgur, who owned the farm that was host to the 1969 Woodstock Festival in the Town of Bethel, which drew an estimated audience of 500,000 and came to define a generation.

Sam wrote a book about his father called “Max B. Yasgur: The Woodstock Festival’s Famous Farmer,” and self-published the work in 2009.

Sam thought that when half a million young people overwhelmed his father’s property and created a three-day event that has since become an indelible part of America’s cultural history, they were also exercising their rights under the first amendment.

Sam made his case in a 2008 lecture that was part of the prestigious New York State Court of Appeals Lecture Series in Albany.

After quoting the text of the First Amendment, Yasgur said, “The right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government? That sounds like the essence of Woodstock. Woodstock could not have been held in Tiananmen Square, or Red Square, or Bagdad or Teheran or in hundreds of other places. We should never forget how much that single sentence, the First Amendment, means to each of us.”

In the book, Yasgur recounted how his father agreed to rent his field to the Woodstock organizers in 1969 because it was a very wet year, which dampened hay production. The rental income would help offset the cost of purchasing thousands of bales of hay.

But his conservative pro-war father also believed deeply in the right of free expression, so said Yasgur. “When some of my neighbors expressed hostility to those anti-war hippies, Dad became angry and the festival became a cause.”

Though it was a rough three days, Yasgur’s father, who had built a bottling plant on the farm, got into the thick of things.

“When he learned that some people were selling water to thirsty kids he became irate; I remember it as if it were just happening now. He told us to take every empty milk bottle from the plant, fill them with water and give them to the kids, and give away all the milk and milk products we had at the dairy.

“When he learned that many of the kids were trampling on neighbors’ crops, not realizing that hay fields were not lawns—they were mostly city kids—he quietly met with groups of the kids, and explained that farmers needed the crops to feed their cattle and the kids responded. They put up little signs in the area saying ‘don’t walk here; these are the provider’s crops.’”

Near the end of the concert, though haggard and extremely tired, the senior Yasgur took to the stage and said, “This is the largest group of people ever assembled in one place, and I think you have proven something to the world, that a half a million kids can get together for three days of fun and music and nothing but fun and music, and I bless you for it.”

Though many of his neighbors turned against him, and despite the fact that after the festival Sam’s father was no longer welcome in the general store, he never regretted the decision.

Said Sam, “He believed that the kids had the right to peaceably assemble, speak freely through their music and petition their government for change.”