By Paul Haseman - Guest Historian
Hal Shelton served the City of Golden in many ways, as a preeminent artist, arts advocate, School Board member, and peace officer, to name a few. All these roles are expanded below. One area of achievement unknown to most arose before and during his Golden days. Hal Shelton came to the scientific fore as a preeminent natural color cartographer. What’s that you ask? It’s a specialized mapmaker who uses color and shading to highlight terrain. This painting exemplifies this special skill in topographic artwork as well as landscape painting. It hangs in the Golden Community Center.
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Shelton (1916 – 2004) was born in New York State and moved with his family to California. He attended Pomona College where, as an art major, he graduated in 1938 with a degree in Scientific Illustration. With jobs hard to find for an artist during the Depression, he took a job with the US Geologic Survey as a “rodman” (a laborer holding a survey pole) for a year before returning to Claremont College to get a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in education. Taking a job as a math teacher in San Diego County, his art aspirations may have ended right there but for the beginning of WWII.
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With his brief USGS experience, he returned to USGS during WWII and, with his budding skill in shaded color relief, he developed useful terrain maps to depict accurately elevation without contour lines for the military on the ground and in the air. After WWII, he remained with USGS in Washington using his contour shading to great acclaim, particularly by US Air Force pilots. Remaining with USGS, on 4 August 1946, he moved to Lakewood, working at the new USGS Rocky Mtn Regional Office at the Federal Center. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed as the Chief Cartographic Engineer for the USGS Shaded Relief Map Program.
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Looking for a smaller town and pasturage for his two horses, in 1953 he moved to Golden with his wife, Mary Shelton, and their four sons, Chris, Tim, (Stony) and Arte. There he bought the 10-acre property of Hugh and Magdalen Beers. The home was 400 yards west of Rte 6, with his closest neighbor for more than 30 years being the Tripp family a quarter mile further south.
He assisted in adding a studio to the house, which being 14 years old, he assumed that it had a water source. Not so. Desperate for a well, he consulted with the head of the USGS Ground Water Branch, who was known with humor to be a dowser or “water witch.” Hearing through a friend of another purported dowser, Golden blacksmith Herb Conners, both dowsers came to his property with their dowsing rods. After tromping his acreage, they shortly informed him that water on a particular site was down 90 feet. They were wrong – drilling a well, they hit water at 93 feet. Everyone laughed at him for believing in dowsing, so he and Mary made dowsing rods for 1954 Christmas presents.
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Retiring from USGS in 1949, Shelton began and continued contract work for the Jeppesen Map Company, for the next 20 years. Founded by Elrey Jeppesen, the company published aeronautical charts and other navigational information for pilots. Jeppesen’s well-earned aeronautical contribution resulted in the naming the main air terminal at Denver International Airport as the Jeppesen Terminal. Shelton’s work with Jeppesen led to The Jeppesen Natural-Color Map Series.
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Shelton had long realized that historic conventional map symbology and contour lines used on topographic maps were inadequate for depicting the landscape in a manner easily understandable by general audiences. So, Shelton improved his shading technique and initiated painting his maps with natural-color shading with detail and realism of satellite images long before satellites were launched. His map shading work became even more enjoyable when he depicted all of the ski runs in Colorado and elsewhere.
With his prior work with USGS and then with Jeppesen, Hal Shelton earned broad recognition to include being honored by presentation ceremonies at the Library of Congress (LOC) and National Geographic Society in June 1985. At the time Shelton said he was “thrilled to see the maps altogether for the first time, and to realize the influence my work has had on the world of cartography." (Transcript 25 Jun 1985). The LOC Manuscript Map Collection today contains 33 of Shelton’s maps to include the World, Europe, South America, and naturally, Colorado, among the 33. NASA employed this collection of maps to index photos of Earth taken on early US space missions.
Meanwhile, with this background and ongoing map work, Shelton gave of himself on behalf of Golden. In 1968 he was the primary founding member with Holly Coors of the Foothills Art Center. The group initially leased and later acquired the former First Presbyterian Church building on Washington Ave to have a permanent location for their work. (Transcript 12 May 68) It took several years for the FAC to flourish as is does today but Shelton at the time noted, “We are proud to be Golden’s artistic, community hub – a place where everyone can come together to share, learn, and grow through creative expression. We create stronger community through art.”
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With his earlier teaching background, in 1958 Shelton was elected to the Jefferson County School Board on which he served for 11 years. His stature as a long-term Board member as well as his renown in Golden made it natural for the School District in 1994 to name the new Shelton Elementary School in his honor. And owning horses, Shelton served as Captain of the Sheriff’s Mounted Posse which performed horseback searches for lost campers and hikers. Shelton and his brother, John Shelton, also collaborated on a book, Geology Illustrated, in which Hal Shelton provided 33 illustrations. John was a Geology professor at Pomona College and, as a pilot, flew over the terrain for photos that brother Hal then used as models for his hand-drawn illustrations. Additionally, the Leadership Golden Program initiated its annual Christmas ornament fundraiser in 1986 with its first ornament painted, of course, by Hal Shelton.
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Hal Shelton made great contributions to Golden and the World and deservedly was inducted into the Jefferson County Hall of Fame in 2008. Thank you, Hal Shelton.