Anyone who has driven Highway 115 through Penrose knows the chair. It sits behind a fence at 708 Fremont St., 21 feet tall, built from hand-hewn Douglas fir logs, heavy enough that its listed weight of 9,100 pounds sounds almost like a joke until you're standing next to it. For most of the last two decades, that's all it's been: a landmark you can't sit in, attached to a building you can't go into, next to a business that hasn't operated since before a lot of current Penrose residents moved to town.
That's about to change. The Apple Shed is reopening on October 3, and the timing is not an accident. That Saturday falls during Penrose's 92nd annual Apple Day Festival, the town's signature fall tradition and, depending on how you count it, one of the longest-running small-town festivals in Fremont County.
A Building That Has Never Been One Thing for Long
Part of what makes this reopening interesting is that the Apple Shed has almost never stayed the same business for more than a decade or two at a stretch. The building went up around 1912, and since then it has operated as a cannery, an apple cider distillery, a winery, a school gymnasium, a wedding venue, and a cafe and mercantile. Its most recent tenant wasn't food or fruit at all. For 30 years, the building was home to Don Ward Transport, formerly Don Ward Trucking, which used the space as a depot rather than a public destination.
That trucking chapter matters more than it might seem. It means the building spent three decades functioning as private commercial space, invisible to the kind of foot traffic that made it a landmark in the first place. If you're under 45 and grew up in or near Penrose, there's a real chance your only memory of 708 Fremont St. is a fenced lot with a giant chair and a warehouse you had no reason to walk into.
The rocking chair itself has an origin story separate from the building's. It was built in 1990 and briefly held the title of World's Largest Rocking Chair before other towns built bigger ones. For a while it sat out front where anyone could climb up and take a photo. Then the cafe and mercantile business that operated the property closed sometime in the mid-2000s, and the chair went behind a wire fence, where it has remained through multiple ownership changes.
The property last changed hands when owners Sam Banning and his wife put it up for sale, describing 9.82 acres of land and a 8,660-square-foot Apple Shed building that had been updated with more than 2,000 square feet of living space. Banning talked about wanting to preserve the building's history rather than let it get gutted for pure utility, recalling a moment when a trucking company wanted to tear out the front of the building to back trucks in and he refused: "we just looked at that and said, 'No, we can't let that happen.'"
That instinct to protect the front of the building instead of hollowing it out for logistics is a big part of why there's still a building worth reopening at all.
Who's Behind the Revival
The person leading the current effort is Amy Dawn Bourlon-Hilterbran, who told the Royal Gorge Region News she sees the project as both a responsibility and an opportunity. Her description of the work ahead was direct: "It's an honor, a challenge, a dream come true."
That combination of honor and challenge is probably the right way to think about reopening a building that's spent more years closed, fenced, or repurposed than it has spent open to the public. The Apple Shed isn't being restored to a single remembered version of itself. It's being reintroduced to a town where most residents have only ever known it as a rumor behind a fence.
Apple Day Turns 92 With the Shed Back in the Mix
Penrose's Apple Day tradition goes back to 1935, when School Superintendent Robert Peterson organized a softball tournament timed to the local apple harvest. The Penrose PTA handled food, entertainment, and prizes for the visiting teams, and the celebration built around the town's apple crop stuck long after the softball tournament faded into the background. The festival has run the first weekend of October for more than 75 years, and it remains, per the Penrose Chamber of Commerce, a weekend when residents and visitors alike fill the streets for apple pie, local vendors, and small-town tradition.
This year's version carries extra weight. The 92nd annual Apple Day Festival now coincides with the return of the one building in town most directly tied to the crop the festival celebrates. For decades, Apple Day happened without an Apple Shed to anchor it. This October, that gap closes.
Penrose itself sits less than 20 minutes from Cañon City in Fremont County, an agricultural community where wineries, hot springs, wildlife viewing, and small orchards define the pace of things more than any single main street does. The Apple Shed's reopening doesn't change that character. It restores a piece of it that had gone quiet.
Why This Is Worth Paying Attention To, Even If You're Not Going Anywhere
It's easy to treat a building reopening as a minor local news item, the kind of thing that shows up in a community newsletter and gets forgotten by November. But the Apple Shed's history says something about how small towns like Penrose actually hold onto their character. The chair stayed visible even when the business behind it failed. The building survived a proposed renovation that would have gutted its facade for a trucking company's convenience. And now, on the eve of the town's 92nd Apple Day, someone is choosing to reopen it as a public space rather than sell it off for its acreage or its access to Highway 115.
None of that required a real estate transaction to matter to the people who already live here. It's simply what happens when a landmark outlasts the businesses that came and went inside it, long enough that eventually someone decides the building is worth waking back up.
If you've got Apple Day plans this year, October 3 is worth building into them. The chair will still be behind its fence when you drive by, at least for now. But for the first time in longer than most of us can remember, there will be a reason to stop the car.
If you're curious about what a landmark reopening like this can mean for property values or interest in a specific block of Penrose, that's a conversation worth having too. Discuss Your Property Needs with the team at Heart of Homes whenever you're ready.
