Some time ago, during the early years of The Broadmoor, Spencer Penrose decided the hotel produced too much waste and his costs were much higher than acceptable.

An impatient man, he decided to take the bull – or more precisely the hog – by the horns and started a pig farm. It was located in his vast land holdings on a site that is now the Country Club of Colorado, near South Nevada and Star Ranch Road.

His ingenious plan was to raise hogs by feeding them the swill from the hotel, then turn around and feed the pigs to the hotel’s guests – pork cutlet reclamation. He also planned to convert the lard from the pigs into soap for The Broadmoor laundry. The whole operation worked smoothly and profitably, save the fact that the hogs, who loved the swill, wouldn’t eat the silverware thrown out with the garbage. But that development had a silver lining: $18,000 worth of silverware was recaptured from the farm in the first year. It was the perfect triangle: Feed the hogs, feed the guests and recover the silverware.

While pleased that the hog farm was profitable, Penrose was so incensed by the needless disposal of silverware that he reacted by eliminating several employees to teach a lesson to the others. They heeded that lesson, and gradually, the amount of silverware recovered from the swill began to dwindle.

At the same time the farm was beginning to prosper, the zoo on the mountain was starting to take off. Curators added exotic and domestic animals, birds and reptiles. That, too, was great for the hotel and the community, though animals began to die. What to do with the dead animals became a growing dilemma, until Penrose suggested burying them at the hog farm. Ingenious, until one day, an elephant died, and it took everything but the volunteer horse brigade to dig the hole and drag him down from the zoo. Finally, he was interred on one of the now-Country Club of Colorado’s golf fairways. Hopefully, I will live long enough to read that a 2 million-year-old mastodon has been discovered on the golf course when someone unearths a tusk.

All good things must come to an end, and it did not take long before the land adjacent to the hog farm began to develop and zoning officials and health inspectors became aware of the operation. It soon became just another chapter of Broadmoor history. In its time, though, it was an ingenious, entrepreneurial venture of great value to The Broadmoor and the zoo, and you better believe tenacious Spencer Penrose did not give up without a fight.