In 1934, at a time when women were rarely seen as leaders in business or travel, Isabel Smith co-founded what would become Hostelling International USA (HI USA) with a bold vision: to make youth travel accessible, foster cultural exchange, and promote global peace. What began in Massachusetts as a radical idea — creating a network of affordable accommodations where young people from different backgrounds could meet, learn, and share experiences — has since grown into a nationwide movement. Now, 90 years later, HI USA continues to embody Smith’s mission, proving that hostels are more than just a place to rest your head — they’re a powerful tool for understanding, connection, and global harmony. As we celebrate nearly a century of hostelling in the United States, it’s time to look back at the woman who helped start it all and the lasting impact of her vision.
Born Isabel Bacheler, Smith had had the spirit of a hosteller since her own youth, though she may not have known it at the time. Growing up in a large family in rural New England in the early 1900s, Isabel was raised to value education, art, faith, and hard work, but above all she was in love with nature.
“As children, we would pack up a lunch and go off into what we called the ‘fields of beauty’ that were skirted by forests or were skirted by unknown magic land beyond us,” Isabel would later recall. “I was… perfectly devoted to every little shaft of sunlight and every little blade of grass.” Years later, working long hours to establish and grow the youth hostelling movement in the U.S., Isabel would continue to be driven by these memories and ideals, believing hostelling would help youth all over the world to access their own “fields of beauty.”
By the time she was in her 20s, Isabel was an artist living in New York City, a “little country nobody,” in her own words, dipping her toe into big city life. Through a friend, she soon met a man named Monroe Smith, who would later become her husband. On an early date at the American Museum of Natural History, Monroe told Isabel he intended to one day marry the type of girl who was not afraid of snakes. Peering down into the enclosure where a snake sat before her, Isabel had picked the nonvenomous creature up by his midsection, enduring three bites to her hand before finally adjusting her grip to make the snake more comfortable. Isabel was the type of person who could find beauty in the unknown, and who did not back down in the face of intimidation. They were soon married.
In the early 1930s, while working with the Boy and Girl Scouts in Rochester, New York, the newlyweds got the opportunity to take a group of American youth to Europe on an “international trip of friendship.” The Smiths took on the challenge with excitement, boarding a trans-Atlantic steamer ship with a group of boys and girls eager to experience the world.
It was on that first trip abroad that the Smiths and their group discovered hostels, meeting and establishing friendships with youth and educators of different backgrounds as they made their way around the continent.
It didn’t take long for Isabel, Monroe, and their young group members to recognize how profoundly hostels could improve international relationships. Onboard the steamer ship bringing the group back to the United States after their first trip to Europe, one of the Smiths’ young travelers approached them, visibly upset. He soon announced that his parents were planning to send him to a military academy back at home. Isabel later recalled what the boy told them next.
“I have met boys and girls of all nationalities at the hostels,” the boy had said. “I never want to aim a gun at any of them.”
“We were simply fascinated by hostels and hostelling in Europe,” Isabel later told an interviewer of that first experience abroad. “The more unfriendliness there was being built up (in the world) at that time, we felt, the greater the need there was to create friendship instead.”
In the fall of 1933, Isabel and Monroe took the first practical step in turning their fascination into a calling: they attended the International Youth Hostel Conference in Krakow, Poland, where they met the man who would change the course of their lives, Richard Schirrman.
A German school teacher who had recognized the need for overnight accommodation that would facilitate education, tolerance, and a love of the outdoors for young children, Schirrman had set up the world’s first youth hostel in Germany in 1914. By the time Isabel and Monroe met him, his vision had become a larger movement, growing into an established coalition of youth hostels in 17 countries.
Schirrman’s idealistic views were not without pushback in pre-World War II Germany. In 1933, after proclaiming publicly that hostels were “castles of peace” through which all children could pass, emphasizing that “the youth hostels are open to the Jewish boy and girl,” he was beaten and left for dead by members of a nationalist group.
Inspired by Schirrman’s message and passion, the Smiths helped to nurse him back to health, in time becoming close with the father of hostelling and learning more about the movement. Before Isabel and Monroe set sail for home, they decided together with Schirmann that they’d be the ones to bring hostelling to the United States.
“Richard said that he had had many professors and many professional people, and a great number of learned enthusiasts, who thought they would take hostelling to America, but they had all failed,” Isabel later recalled. But there was a big difference between those predecessors and the Smiths, Isabel noted: “They had come with neatly pressed suits and shiny glasses and notebooks, but they hadn’t come in shorts and with bicycles and knapsacks and spirit. And while they failed, he felt that we would be the ones that would succeed.”
Isabel and Monroe wholeheartedly accepted the challenge, knowing that meant they’d have to take on all the responsibility entailed themselves.
It was an uphill battle, with many in the U.S. feeling the idea of hostelling was “totally unsuited to American conditions and attitudes,” according to a history of AYH from 1973. But, backed by the enthusiasm and support of thousands of young Americans, the Smiths stayed true to their purpose of establishing hostels as a means of “promoting international friendship and understanding during a period of warfare, terror, and unrest.” They would officially found American Youth Hostels (AYH) in 1934.
Isabel and Monroe’s belief in their purpose was crucial to keeping them going. Though they already had the responsibility of caring for two young children by 1934, they personally took on the search for the location of the United States’ first hostel. The Smiths drove long hours for weeks on end while scouting locations, rolling out their sleeping bags under the stars on the side of the road when fatigue overtook them.
They eventually settled on Northfield, MA as the location for the country’s first hostel. Close to the Green, White, and Berkshire mountains, Northfield offered easy access to the types of “fields of beauty” Isabel had loved as a child, yet it was close enough to larger population centers that guests could get to the hostel by bicycle – a key factor in the days when hostels were primarily accessed by bike. The Smiths rented out the basement floor of the local Schell Chateau at a bargain price, selling their home, cashing in their insurance, and using their savings (and their own hands) to convert the basement into a warm and welcoming hostel.
That first hostel opened on December 27, 1934, with Isabel and Monroe acting as “house parents.” By the following summer there were 35 youth hostels set up in farmhouses, barns, unused church basements, and schoolhouses throughout New Hampshire and Vermont, establishing a “hostel loop” covering about 500 cyclable miles. By 1936, the number of hostels had more than doubled, with hostellers themselves pitching in and working on construction and other projects to get them set up. Officials from as far away as Japan and England were coming to Northfield to meet with Isabel and Monroe and discuss hostelling in their own countries.
That year, AYH began to publish The Knapsack, a quarterly piece sent to all hostel “passholders” (today, we call them “members”) with information on hostels, cycling routes, and upcoming group trips. Isabel, a talented artist and former art teacher, took on the role of graphic designer and illustrator.
“(The fireplace) here at headquarters has already been a warming spot of friendships,” Isabel wrote in the Spring 1937 edition of the publication. “Our Knapsack, like our fireplace, is bringing into our circle youth hostelers from far and wide. Increasingly we feel that we are one big family.”
The Smiths kept their close ties with Schirrman even as World War II drew nearer and travel to and from Germany became more and more dangerous. Isabel and Monroe’s son Jonathan once told the story of how his mother had traveled to Germany in 1936 in order to accompany Richard Schirrman at a youth conference in Denmark. When they were stopped from passing the checkpoints at the German border, Isabel quickly formulated a successful plan to sneak Schirrman past under the guards’ noses.
“I thought of how my mother had immense courage to do this, for if the design had ever been revealed, she would have been punished as an accessory to Richard’s escape,” Jonathan would later be quoted in the book Isabel Smith – Artist, Teacher, Peacemaker. “My mother was courageous, yet very modest. She was not one to tell this story as she was inclined to minimize her exploits.”
Isabel and Monroe were at an international youth hostelling conference in Scotland when WWII broke out in 1939. While the war prevented them from continuing to bring groups of hostellers to Europe in the following years, the Smiths set their sights closer to home, organizing American hosteller trips to Alaska, Mexico, and South America, and even utilizing a “rolling hostel” railroad car to ferry young hostellers and their bicycles across the U.S. The network of AYH hostels continued to grow, expanding across the United States with the help of countless volunteers and a small staff hired to help the Smiths at the organization’s headquarters in Northfield.
Isabel and Monroe turned over leadership of AYH in 1948, but remained involved in the movement for hostelling and in their support of youth travel. As soon as WWII ended, the Smiths organized a group of American hostellers to travel to Europe by boat, bringing their own food and construction supplies, to help rebuild destroyed hostels in allied countries.
The Smiths continued to advocate for youth in the decades that followed, using their own time, financial assets, and political influence to fight for a better future for youth from Harlem to Florida. They donated land, founded a reading camp, and even lobbied the airlines to make cross-Atlantic travel more affordable to the average American.
Over the years, Isabel survived multiple illnesses and serious injuries, defying doctors’ predictions and fighting her way back to health each time. Her struggles, though, never stood in the way of her love of hostelling, which she passed on to her children and her grandchildren. In 1968, Isabel and Monroe were recognized by the Japanese Youth Hostel Association for helping to bring hostelling to Japan, and in 1972 they were invited to attend the International Youth Hostel Rally in Tokyo. While Isabel wasn’t well enough at the time to make the trip, she sent her granddaughter Carol along with Monroe to climb Mt. Fuji, learn about Japanese culture, and create friendships with people from around the world. Isabel died in 1985.
Today, Isabel’s vision is alive and well at HI USA as we strive to empower global citizens, fostering a deeper understanding of people, places, and the world around. After all, in Isabel’s own words, written while sailing home from an early “mission of friendship,” it’s the best way to make the world a better place:
“We who roam are not content to care for our own contentment, our own homes. Bless us all, this family of the world, and add forever to our courage, our patience, and our love that we may be a leaven to make all lovelier.”