Following a suggestion from a Fullerton Observer reader named Jeff, I decided to look into the history behind the Fullerton Hostel by Brea Dam Park off Harbor Boulevard.  Beyond the park’s boundary, at the end of a short curving, uphill driveway  (which runs adjacent to a nearby golf course), a two-story Spanish-style house that was a place for international travelers to stay has been torn down.

Fullerton Hostel in disrepair in 2023

The land the Fullerton Hostel once sat on is now empty and closed. The area is restricted and fenced in, with multiple no trespassing signs posted by the U.S. Government. Interestingly, when I was hiking in the Brea Dam area back in the summer of 2023, the 1930s-style home was in disrepair but still extant, although it looked as though it hadn’t been lived in for quite some time.
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Hostels are generally designed to promote an appreciation for travel and are aimed at international students, workers, or travelers who are looking for lodging. Familiar to European travelers, hostels typically offer inexpensive dormitory-style rooms for visitors to stay in. According to  Hostelling International USA, the hostelling movement began in 1909 when a German schoolteacher named Richard Schirrmann started taking students on “overnight field trips to the countryside to encourage a healthy lifestyle and an appreciation of the natural world.”

This movement arrived in the United States in 1934, when schoolteachers and Scout leaders Isabel and Monroe Smith experienced European hostels on a trip with their students and decided to bring that same experience to people living in the U.S. By 1935, hostels began springing up around New England in farmhouses, where the couple would act as house parents, supported by the townspeople.

Tourists to the Orange County area could sleep in the Fullerton Hostel, a “former dairy farmhouse perched upon a grassy hill overlooking Fullerton,” according to an article covering three different O.C. hostels by Danny Sullivan in the July 4th, 1990 issue of the Los Angeles Times’ Orange County Edition. Sullivan wrote that “Fullerton is the most secluded… Little remains of the former dairy farm; its barn is a pile of wood. But the hostel does have a history –it was once a farmhouse and later home for the dam keeper.”
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Today, the only evidence of this is a faded plaque set into an oversized rock located slightly downhill from the closed entrance gate into the hostel property. The plaque was erected by the Fullerton Chapter of the Izaak  Walton League, and it reads, “In memory of Clarence Marshall Stanfield, First Care-Taker of Brea Dam.”
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In 1942, when the Brea Dam was built by the Army Corps of Engineers, the building that became the hostel was a place where some of the work crew lived, according to Walter Clark’s Fullerton Walks website. Stanfield, the first dam tender, and his family later moved into the residence. “It was eventually abandoned because they didn’t like to be assigned where to live,” wrote Clark.

Visiting the Local History Room at the Fullerton Public Library, I learned from reading a May 1982 issue of this very newspaper that the Fullerton City Council and Army Corps of Engineers would vote on whether or not to convert the damkeeper’s house and barn into a hostel, which was scheduled to open before the 1984 Olympics.

By the time the Observer’s October 1982  issue was published, Fullerton College construction technology students had been recruited to help convert the dam keeper’s residence into a hostel through an agreement with American Youth Hostels (AYH), a member of the International Youth Hostel Foundation.

The students were able to earn course credit, under the guidance of Technical Education teacher Bob Chapman, as they renovated the historic house at 1700 N. Harbor Boulevard and converted the old barn into a 50-bed dormitory-style facility, according to the Fullerton Observer at the time.

Cheri Pape, Archivist at the Fullerton Public Library’s Local History Room, was very helpful in directing me to articles documenting the hostel’s construction. Pape shared via email a story she had scanned from the January 13, 1983 issue of the Fullerton Daily News Tribune, which reported that construction on the youth hostel was halted because of city building requirements that weren’t being met by AYH.

Even though it sounds like they intended to open before the 1984 Olympics came to L.A., the hostel wasn’t actually available for international visitors until November 18, 1985. In short time, the Fullerton Hostel gained a good reputation, receiving 249 recorded overnight visitors in its first six weeks of operation, according to Kirk Schneider’s reporting for an April 1986 issue of the Fullerton Observer at the time.

By 2009, the Fullerton Hostel had recorded over 90,000 overnight stays. The only trouble some visitors had, according to comments in the guest registrar, was actually finding the hostel since it was hard to locate on top of the hill off Harbor Boulevard.

The Fullerton residence was conveniently located for many who wanted to explore what Southern California had to offer. The Los Angeles Council of American Youth Hostels Inc. (AYH) leased the Fullerton hostel from the Army Corps of Engineers for $100 per year, according to a 2009 issue of the Orange County Register. Back when it opened in 1985, the Fullerton Hostel charged travelers $6.75 per night. By 2009, the dorm rate was $22 to $24 a night from June through September, according to Hostelling International USA.

The hostel was once open year-round, but after 9/11, it closed and reopened with only summer schedules available. According to the Fullerton Walks website, “in the winter, the Hostel is closed to keep vandals from doing damage.”

The location of the now destroyed former Fullerton Hostel (2025)

By the 2010s,  Hostelling International could only take people at the Fullerton location with reservations and had to see everyone’s picture identification before they could stay at the former farmhouse and dam keeper’s residence. It’s not entirely clear when the hostel shut down for good, but the last time I saw the building, it looked abandoned with its windows boarded up and the roof looked like it had experienced a fire of some sort.

While it is disappointing that the historic Spanish-style home is no longer a part of the local and international community, memories of the hostel live on through articles and photos in the Fullerton Public Library’s Local History Room, which is open for limited public access hours from Tuesday to Friday.

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