Youth hostel at Burfiend Farm coming soon

By Jacob Wheeler
Sun editor

The American Youth Hostel organization’s wait at Port Oneida has nearly drawn to a close.
After years of grueling debate, the Secretary of the Interior in Washington D.C. pealed away the red tape and ruled that hostels are acceptable concessions in the National Park.
And after days of nerve-racking drizzle, the clouds receded over the Burfiend Farm houses north of Glen Arbor on Port Oneida Rd. Saturday, September 16th turned out to be a perfect work day at the future youth hostel sight.
Nearly thirty AYH members of varying ages and various nationalities sweat and toiled over three buildings and an outhouse which, some day soon, will comprise Michigan’s only current youth hostel.
The American Youth Hostel organization is a nonprofit group comprised of volunteers with a passion for traveling in their blood and the will to extend that opportunity to younger generations.
Michael and Wendy Willihnganz, for instance, are a couple from the Detroit area who serve on the AYH Michigan branch’s board of directors. They spent this particular day hours from home, patching up the stepway down to Burfiend Farm’s Lake Michigan waterfront, rebuilding porches on the farm houses and replacing the support structure under the outhouse, which was leaning to the right and rotting.
“We were told the deal is all done but the signing,” said Michael, a hostel conoissour who was gearing up for a European hostel tour weeks after the work day at Burfiend Farm. “There’s no other alternative cheap housing in this area, but what a glorious place to come visit.”
Youth hostels were introduced early in the century in Germany by a group of people which believed that the industrialization of Europe deprived young people of discovering the nature around them. He began with a hostel in the Black Forest and then expanded.
Monroe and Isabel Smith opened the first youth hostel in the United States, in 1936 in Northfield, Massachusets. The school teachers had visited hostels in Germany and decided that America also needed to encourage the goodwill of those willing to welcome travelers into their homes — in the heart of the Great Depression, when many didn’t have enough money to eat.
Hank Joerger, a native New Yorker who now resides in Suttons Bay, met Monroe Smith on a biking trip in Vermont. Joerger had no idea what a hostel was at the time, but Smith pointed out that the young man looked weary and needed air in his tires. He filled Joerger’s tires and gave him free room and board for three days, provided that Joerger help him with a building project.
The kindness of strangers fueled the hostel movement in the early days.
“I also remember couple who built a shed onto their house and welcomed in travelers almost every day for forty years,” said Joerger, a passionate biker to this day. “They each held jobs, yet the woman served milk and cookies to every guest. That’s some kind of heart.”
Hostels today are more defined than they were decades ago, though travelers still swap tales of places they can stay for free, provided they help the host with a chore or project. The proprietor of Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore next to the Notre Dame in Paris, lets backpack-toters bring in food and crash on the floor if they help sweep the floor or restock shelves for an hour.