Judging by their sweaters and shirts, it looks like it was spring or a cool summer when the Kerfoot family took time for a family photo at Gunflint Lodge some years ago. (L-R) Robert, Bruce, Justine, Sue and Lee.
Gunflint Lodge has been sold to John and Mindy Fredrickson and as a new family settles in, the News- Herald talked to Bruce Kerfoot, son of the iconic Justine Kerfoot of Gunflint Lodge.
Justine and her husband Bill’s story is well known, but their son Bruce, who has guided and grown the resort throughout his life, also has his story, and here is a small piece of it, shared with the News-Herald on one of his last days as the owner of Gunflint Lodge.
Just how big a footprint does Gunflint Lodge have?
We have 104 acres commercially zoned with around 1,800 feet of lakeshore.
Look up the word “icon” in the dictionary and you could find a picture of your mother there. How was it to follow in your parents’ footsteps?
Challenging. Mom and I were both “type A” people and we found we could not run the business together without killing ourselves. We were still seasonal in those days, so Mom moved to town to run our town outfitters in the summer and told me to sink or swim.
A young couple at the time, Bruce and Sue at the front desk of Gunflint Lodge, open and ready for business.
We had a couple of challenging years but we got it all to work. We lost some of our guests who liked it the way Mom ran things, but we had to move ahead with new ideas and marketing to grow with the times.
Will your children miss not having the business in the family?
I have four children— Brian and Shawn from my first marriage and Robert and Lee with Sue. The two older children made their careers elsewhere, and we tried to pass the hat on to Robert and Lee which did not work out. Yes, there is remorse in the family that we will be passing the torch on to others, but we have all agreed that it is the only choice we have if Sue and I want any quality time at the end of our career.
How has living on the Trail changed over the years?
When I was young our only neighbors were the Native Americans and a few seasonal neighbors. We had the only phone and mail drop so everyone stopped in for tea, the news of the day, etc.
When I was small the road was not plowed in the winter on a regular basis— they tried to plow it once at Christmas and once at Easter. We got around by dog team and snowshoes, but basically we wintered in—we all had root cellars, a deer hanging in the back shed, a line in the lake for lake trout, an outhouse, and a sled dog yard out back. We were all living a simple lifestyle, living off the land to quite an extent, trapping and hunting as needed.
We had to burn a pot of gas under our car engines to warm things up enough to start them, and all cars had chains on all winter, since there were no 4-wheel drive vehicles. In those days a person sometimes had to shovel two tracks up the hills in the road to continue on their way. The road was so rough that, as kids, we all got car sick coming and going to town.
Our last supply truck of the year arrived in October and that had to last us until sometime in May. REA [Rural Electrification Administration] brought electricity to the Gunflint in the 1950s so we finally had enough power to run all our appliances at one time, which was a treat we had never known.
I think we had our first flush toilet in the 1950s and that was such a novelty that we did not have a surrounding partition around it initially.
Now we fast forward to the present time and it seems like another world. We can drive to town as needed, one of these days we may have enough neighbors that we actually will have to put curtains on our windows, and we have the internet.
What about school?
I did home schooling for most of my years. I boarded out in sixth grade, living with Hilda and Andy Hedstrom, and then Mom bought a house on Maple Hill so I could do my last three years of high school in town.
New lodge owners think they are going to go on a lot of canoe/camping trips. Is that the case?
As we all know, as owners we got very little time to play, as we were all trying to make a living. However, Mom did her best to see that we got out on one three- or four-day canoe trip each fall. Otherwise, we all worked seven days a week, and that was just the way it was.
More of Brian Larsen’s interview with former Gunflint Lodge owner Bruce Kerfoot will follow in an upcoming issue.
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