# The Orchard at the Foot of the Mountain: Spencer and Julie Penrose, and Who Gets the Dividends Now

A Philadelphia black sheep sold a gold mine and kept the mill, built the Broadmoor outside a dry town, and left it all to an orchard-named trust. The 990 shows exactly how the money works 89 years later.

Author: J.A. Watte
Published: July 4, 2026
Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/el-pomar-penrose-orchard/

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Of all the deathless ledgers this series has read, from [Girard's](/blog/stephen-girard-forgotten-founder/) to [Bill Daniels'](/blog/bill-daniels-ledger-lived-forward/), the El Pomar Foundation of Colorado Springs may be the most complete specimen: a fortune with a legible origin, a founder with a genuine character arc, a marriage that redirected the money's purpose, a federal tax law that forced the trust to let go of its crown jewel, and a modern Form 990-PF that shows, line by line, how the machine runs and who it pays 89 years later. So this post gives it the full treatment its one paragraph in [Volume Two of the Quiet Shelf](/blog/quiet-shelf-volume-two/) couldn't.

## The black sheep of a serious family

Spencer Penrose was born November 2, 1865 in Philadelphia to a family that expected distinction and mostly got it. His father helped found the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. His brother Boies became a United States senator; his brother Richard, a geologist eminent enough for the National Mining Hall of Fame. Spencer went to Harvard like the rest and graduated at the bottom of his class, then went west, landing first in Las Cruces, New Mexico, going nowhere in particular. Readers of this series have met this opening before: [Girard the cabin boy](/blog/stephen-girard-forgotten-founder/), [Daniels bought out for $5,000 at thirty](/blog/bill-daniels-ledger-lived-forward/). The ledger keeps no record of where a man starts.

What it records is the first good decision. Around 1892 his boyhood friend Charles L. Tutt invited him to Colorado Springs to chase the Cripple Creek gold boom, and the two took a stake in the C.O.D. Mine. In 1895 they sold it for $250,000, and here is the move this series has now watched three separate fortunes make: they did not buy more mines. They put the money into the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company, an ore-processing operation built with Charles Mather MacNeill, which meant that from then on it didn't matter which prospector struck gold, because the ore came through their mill either way. Sell the hole, keep the machine every hole must pay. It's [Willing underwriting the first bank](/blog/thomas-willing-forgotten-founder/), Daniels brokering the cable industry, Penrose milling the gold rush.

Then he did it again at continental scale. In 1903 Penrose formed the Utah Copper Company to work the Bingham Canyon deposit using Daniel Jackling's heretical idea: mass mining, moving mountains of low-grade ore at open-pit scale instead of chasing rich veins underground. The method rebuilt the world's copper industry, Bingham Canyon became one of the largest man-made excavations on earth, and Penrose's stake became one of the great western fortunes, assembled not by finding treasure but by industrializing the finding.

## The town he bought toys for

What Penrose did with the money made him singular. He came back to Colorado Springs and essentially furnished the region: with Tutt he completed the Pikes Peak Highway in 1916 and founded the hill climb race that still runs it; he built the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo; he raised the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun on the mountainside. And in 1918, having bought the property two years earlier with partners Albert E. Carlton and MacNeill, he opened the Broadmoor, a resort hotel costing over $3 million, sited deliberately outside the city limits because Colorado Springs was dry and Spencer Penrose had no intention of running a dry hotel. A man whose family expected a senator built, instead, the finest playground in the Rockies, and the ledger's verdict is that the playground outlasted most of the Senate's work.

## Julie, and what the money learned from her

The purpose the fortune eventually took came substantially from his wife, and her road to that marriage was brutal. Julie Villiers Lewis was born in 1870 in Detroit, daughter of the businessman Alexander Lewis. She married James McMillan in 1890, had two children, and moved the family to Colorado Springs for her husband's health; in the spring of 1902 her young son Jimmy died of a ruptured appendix and her husband died weeks later, on May 9. The widow stayed. In April 1906 she married Spencer Penrose at St. George's Church in London, and the hard-drinking mill baron acquired, in one ceremony, a partner with a completely different theory of money. Julie funded the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, gave $3.2 million toward what became Penrose Memorial Hospital, built the Pauline Chapel, and funded the revival of Central City's summer opera festival, the same opera house this series just watched [May Bonfils and Charles Stanton meet through](/blog/quiet-shelf-rocky-mountain-foundations/). The couple bought the estate that gave everything its name: El Pomar, "the orchard," a Spanish-styled villa built in 1910 on the site of the old Dixon Apple Orchard.

## The orchard is planted

On December 17, 1937, Spencer and Julie established the El Pomar Foundation with an initial gift of $21 million and a mission written in one sentence: "to enhance, encourage, and promote the future and current well-being of the people of Colorado." Note what the sentence does and doesn't do, because this series has read enough founding documents to grade them. It binds geography absolutely, Colorado, forever, and binds purpose loosely, well-being, which is why El Pomar never needed [a Buell-style trustee rewrite](/blog/quiet-shelf-rocky-mountain-foundations/): the founder drew the fence exactly where he wanted it and left the pasture open.

Spencer died two years later, December 7, 1939. The hotel, the Manitou Incline, the Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway, and a sizable amount of his fortune transferred to the foundation, which meant, remarkably, that a charitable trust now owned the grandest resort in the West. Julie served as the foundation's president from 1939 to 1955, moved into a suite on the Broadmoor's sixth floor around 1944, running the orchard from inside its showpiece, and died January 23, 1956. She is buried in the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun, the monument on the mountain her husband built.

## The law that made the orchard let go

For nearly fifty years the foundation and the hotel were one estate, and then Congress redrew the species. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 created the excess business holdings rules, the same law this series has watched shape every foundation since, and its effect on El Pomar was existential: a charity could no longer simply own a resort empire. Due to the act's impact, the foundation sold its majority interest in the Broadmoor in 1988; the Oklahoma Publishing Company took control the following year, and in 2011 the hotel was bought by the Anschutz Corporation, which closes a loop inside this very series: Penrose's hotel now belongs to the company behind [the largest private foundation on the Volume Two shelf](/blog/quiet-shelf-volume-two/). The forced sale looks, in the long ledger, like the best thing that ever happened to the mission: it converted a hotel into a diversified endowment, which is the machine the 990 now describes.

## The machine today, straight from the filing

El Pomar's 2024 Form 990-PF reports $711.2 million in assets at fair market value, and unusually among the thirty-plus filings this series has read, it itemizes a genuinely interesting investment book. The single largest equity line is "equities managed by El Pomar," $132.3 million at market against a $32.7 million book value, an in-house portfolio sitting on a hundred million dollars of embedded gains, which tells you those shares have been held for decades, compounding untouched, [the Avenir lesson](/blog/quiet-shelf-volume-two/) run inside a foundation. Around it sit outside managers with familiar names: Dodge & Cox at $81.2 million, Loomis Sayles at $69.0 million, EARNEST Partners at $63.1 million, and an international sleeve through American Funds EuroPacific, Causeway, WCM, and Artisan totaling roughly $89 million. Below the public markets runs a private book of partnerships, Adams Street, Horsley Bridge, Mesirow, Monarch, Siguler Guff, Bertram, OHA Credit Solutions, plus Enterprise Products units, and, in the loveliest single line in the filing, TEPPCO oil royalties of $5,528 for the year: an extraction fortune still receiving a tiny royalty check, an echo the size of a rounding error. The filing even itemizes what the machine costs to run: $553,437 to Loomis Sayles, $428,623 to EARNEST, $142,989 to WCM, $90,290 to CAPTRUST, $92,621 to Northern Trust as custodian, $53,990 for the Bloomberg terminal, and $816 to the New York Stock Exchange, which may be the most precisely documented investment operation in this whole series.

The people are documented too. Kyle H. Hybl serves as president and chief executive at $481,264 plus benefits; William J. Hybl, chair emeritus, remains at $181,019, two generations of one family in the foundation's leadership. The chief investment officer and vice chair, at $442,829, signs as R. Thayer Tutt Jr., and Tutt is the name this entire story started with in 1892; the filings don't chart the family tree, so this series won't either, but the echo on the officer page is loud enough to hear. The board itself is paid, trustee stipends of roughly $32,000 to $83,000 for the chair, which contrasts with the unpaid volunteer boards elsewhere on the shelf and buys, in exchange, a working board that meets on grant decisions four to six times a year. There is even a vice president of history on staff, which tells you how seriously the institution takes being 89 years old.

## Who gets the dividends

Now the question this post was asked. The filing reports $19,546,032 in grants paid during the year and another $10,359,500 approved for future payment, roughly thirty million dollars of commitments against the $711 million orchard. One honesty note first: the filing's grant detail points to an attached statement that this public copy does not reproduce, so the named grantee list isn't in the document itself, and this series reports that plainly rather than around it. Who receives the money is answered instead by the foundation's own published grantmaking record, which is unusually specific. The dividends go to Colorado, exclusively, per the founding sentence, through five program areas the foundation traces to its founders' own interests: arts and culture, civic and community initiatives, education, health, and human services. Since 2003, eleven regional councils spread the money past the Front Range, community-informed grantmaking for each corner of the state, so the orchard's fruit doesn't all fall next to the tree. Applications run on a rolling basis with trustee reviews four to six times a year, funded organizations wait three years before returning, and the cumulative ledger, per the foundation's own accounting, stands at more than 25,000 grants totaling over $600 million since 1937, with distributions now running above $25 million annually. Alongside the checks run the operating programs that make El Pomar odd and interesting: the El Pomar Fellowship that trains young Coloradans in nonprofit leadership, the Awards for Excellence honoring the state's best organizations, even a Rocky Mountain Tax Seminar whose registration fees appear as revenue in the filing. Penrose built a hotel to host the West; his foundation, having been made to sell it, now hosts the state's civic sector instead.

Read the whole arc through this series' laws and El Pomar is nearly a perfect score. The fortune was amassed on the infrastructure position, the mill and not the mine. The purpose was written with a hard fence and an open pasture, which is why it never suffered a Buell rewrite. The corpus survived losing its crown asset because the mission was Colorado, not the hotel. The investment book holds its oldest positions for decades and publishes its costs to the dollar. And the dividends flow to five things two specific people loved, art, community, learning, health, and care, through eleven regional councils neither of them lived to imagine. Spencer Penrose graduated last in his class at Harvard and is now in his ninetieth year of paying Colorado a dividend. The ledger, as this series keeps finding, grades on a very long curve.

## Related reading

- [The Quiet Shelf, Volume Two](/blog/quiet-shelf-volume-two/): El Pomar among its twenty peers, sorted by how long the money has worked.
- [How Deathless Money Invests](/blog/how-deathless-money-invests/): the seven-style taxonomy this filing's book belongs to.
- [Bill Daniels Repaid Debts He Didn't Owe](/blog/bill-daniels-ledger-lived-forward/): the other great Colorado ledger, and the lineage from Franklin to Hershey.
- [The Orphan's Dividend](/blog/girard-college-orphans-dividend/): what Girard's version of "who gets the dividends" looks like, measured in graduates.

## Fact-check notes and sources

- **Spencer Penrose's life (the November 2, 1865 Philadelphia birth, the family including senator Boies Penrose and geologist Richard, the father's role founding Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the bottom-of-class Harvard finish, Las Cruces, Charles L. Tutt's invitation around 1892, the C.O.D. Mine purchase and 1895 sale for $250,000, the Colorado-Philadelphia Reduction Company with Tutt and Charles Mather MacNeill, the 1903 Utah Copper Company with Daniel Jackling's mass-mining of Bingham Canyon, the 1916 Pikes Peak Highway and hill climb, the Broadmoor's 1916 property purchase with Albert E. Carlton and MacNeill and its 1918 opening at over $3 million outside the dry city, the December 17, 1937 founding of El Pomar with Julie, and his December 7, 1939 death)**: [Wikipedia, "Spencer Penrose"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Penrose), attributed, with [the Colorado Encyclopedia](https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/spencer-penrose) and [El Pomar's own history](https://www.elpomar.org/about-us/our-history/).
- **Julie Penrose (the 1870 Detroit birth as Julia Villiers Lewis, the 1890 McMillan marriage, the family's move for her husband's health, the deaths of her son and husband weeks apart in spring 1902, the April 1906 London wedding at St. George's, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the $3.2 million toward Penrose Memorial Hospital, the Pauline Chapel, funding the revival of Central City's opera festival, the El Pomar presidency from 1939 to 1955, the Broadmoor sixth-floor residence from about 1944, her January 23, 1956 death, and burial in the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun)**: [Wikipedia, "Julie Penrose"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Penrose), attributed. The two Wikipedia articles give the wedding date as April 26 and April 28 respectively, so this post says only April 1906.
- **The estate and foundation (the El Pomar estate's 1910 villa on the Dixon Apple Orchard site and the name meaning "the orchard," the $21 million initial gift, and the quoted mission)**: [Wikipedia, "El Pomar Estate"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Pomar_Estate) and [El Pomar's history](https://www.elpomar.org/about-us/our-history/).
- **The Broadmoor's ownership arc (the transfer of the hotel, Manitou Incline, Manitou and Pikes Peak Railway, and fortune to the foundation at Penrose's death, the Tax Reform Act of 1969's impact, the 1988 majority sale, Oklahoma Publishing's 1989 control, and the Anschutz Corporation's 2011 purchase)**: [Wikipedia, "The Broadmoor"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broadmoor), attributed.
- **The filing (the $711,209,271 fair market value; the $19,546,032 in grants paid and $10,359,500 approved for future payment; the investment schedule including the $132,313,317 in-house-managed equities against $32,706,353 book value, Dodge & Cox at $81,204,549, Loomis Sayles at $69,044,255, EARNEST Partners at $63,112,864, the international funds, the Adams Street, Horsley Bridge, Mesirow, Monarch, Siguler Guff, Bertram, and OHA partnerships, the Enterprise Products units, and the $5,528 TEPPCO royalties; the itemized manager and service fees down to the $816 New York Stock Exchange line; the officer compensation for Kyle H. Hybl, William J. Hybl, R. Thayer Tutt Jr., and the trustee stipends; and the program-related investments)**: read directly from [El Pomar Foundation's 2024 Form 990-PF](https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/846002373), including its attached schedules. The grant-recipient statement referenced at Part XV is not reproduced in the public filing copy, and no grantee names are asserted from it.
- **The grantmaking record (the five program areas, the eleven regional councils created under the 2003 Regional Partnerships program, the rolling applications with four-to-six trustee reviews a year and the three-year wait, distributions above $25 million annually, and the more than 25,000 grants totaling over $600 million since 1937)**: [El Pomar's own grantmaking pages](https://www.elpomar.org/grant-making/).

*This post is informational and historical, not financial or philanthropic advice. All figures are reproduced from the cited filing and the foundation's own publications; individuals are discussed from the public record as nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied and nothing endorsed by El Pomar Foundation. No genealogical claims are made about persons sharing surnames.*


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