Back twenty years to... Monday, September 11th, 2006. Day 156. '9/11'. The so seminal Woodstock Music Festival, frozen yogurts and ice cream. Baseball in Cooperstown and Doubleday Field. The spectacular beauty of Niagara Falls, and houses all made out of shuttering-board.

"At around six, quite obviously, all of the morning news channels are focused on the 9/11 Memorial Services – at 'Ground Zero', in New York City – and elsewhere around the Country. I make coffee, get online and get some e-mail done. I’m half-watching 'NBC', and at 08:46 – the precise time, five years ago when the first plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre – there’s a full minute's silence. Now, following a short speech from Michael Bloomberg, the New York City Mayor, a group of women – speaking softly but forcibly, and alternately in pairs – begin reading out the names of the dead. Hauntingly moving, and at just a whisper under three thousand to get through, it takes a while. The evocatively macabre 'roll-call' is reverently accompanied in the background, by an ensemble of cellos and violins, effecting appropriately melancholic verses.

Away from the Comfort Inn at nine-thirty and I drive north, climbing steadily on State Highway 42, through some splendidly green scenery. Way back – in November last year, when I was busy researching the towns and planning the route – I decided that I wanted to make the pilgrimage to the site of 'Woodstock'. The lauded 1969 music festival. It seemed a simple-enough thing. Find the town of Woodstock on the New York State map – and you’ve found the festival.

However, as I delved into it further, it quite soon became apparent that the incredible, seminal show was actually staged a fair many miles south-west of the town. Forty-one to be exact – as the happy-hippy, stoned-out crow flies – and a little over sixty-five by road, just outside the small town of Bethel. I found the precise location of the original and best 'multi-musical love-in happening' on the web just this morning. The flower-powered route takes me to Monticello, where I turn west on State Highway 17B. A few miles on, and sure enough, as I reach the town limit to the east – there’s an appropriately brightly-coloured sign – proclaiming the place as the site of the:

"Woodstock Festival – three days of peace, (love) and music."

In Search of Small-Town America: Volume 1 is a free-of-charge Pdf digital download – available from our shop. A table of contents, the introduction, the route-map – and featuring content on the first two States travelled: New Mexico and Arizona.

Jeremy Hammond I am a British writer and photographer, and have travelled through India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia, but most extensively in North America. In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked as lighting crew, and later designer, for many top-named British bands, on tours through Europe, Japan, and the USA. I’ve worked as a cruise-ship photographer, in office and store design, database design, visual arts book publishing and as a London-based freelance photographer, specialising in interiors and architecture.