Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency facts for kids
The Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency was a private detective agency in the United States from the early 1890s to 1937. The agency's members played a key role in the events that led to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 and violent repression of labor union members. Significant incidents, later collectively known as the Coal Wars, occurred in various locations. The Pocahontas Coalfield region of West Virginia witnessed some of these events. Among these incidents are the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, 1913–1914 Colorado Coalfield War (which notably included the Ludlow Massacre in 1914), and the Battle of Matewan in 1920.
The agency was founded in the early 1890s by William Gibbony Baldwin as the Baldwin Detective Agency.
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Formation
Baldwin, the senior member of the firm, was a native of Tazewell County, Virginia. An avid reader of detective novels in his youth, Baldwin was a small storekeeper in his early days. He then studied dentistry but left that profession to become a detective. He began his career in 1884 with the Eureka Detective Agency in Charleston, West Virginia. After founding the Baldwin Detective Agency, he then moved to Roanoke, Virginia, to oversee security operations in the Norfolk and Western Railway's coalfield district. He was later appointed chief special agent, a position he held until his retirement, in 1930.
Thomas Lafayette Felts was a native of Galax, Virginia, who was educated as a lawyer and was a member of the Virginia Bar Association. In 1900, he joined the Baldwin Detective Agency as a partner who could provide legal advice to the firm. In 1910, the name of the agency was changed to the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency, and its headquarters were in Bluefield, West Virginia.
Originally, the company provided investigative services to railroads for train robberies and other crimes. Little is known about this chapter in the history of Baldwin–Felts, but it is known that the company provided guards for railway and mine payrolls and accompanied coal trains into the coalfields. The company investigated train wrecks, robberies, and thefts. By the early 1900s, the agency had also undertaken detective work for both federal and state government agencies.
National prominence
The agency rose to national prominence with the pursuit and capture of the fugitive Floyd Allen and members of his family who were involved in a courtroom shootout in Carroll County, Hillsville, Virginia. Five people died and seven were wounded, including Commonwealth's Attorney William Foster, Sheriff Lewis F. Webb, and Judge Thornton Lemmon Massie. The event was reported nationally from March 13 to April 15, 1912.
Governor Mann phoned the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency in Roanoke and asked them to hunt down the Allens. The detectives cut a wide swathe through Carroll County in their quest. The wounded Allen was arrested at his hotel by Felts personally. Most of the Allens and their relations were arrested by a posse of Baldwin–Felts detectives, who chased down the fugitives in a relentless search that was carried out regardless of weather conditions. Nevertheless, two of the men (Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards) escaped to Des Moines, Iowa. An informant (Maude Iroller) tipped the agency as to the men's whereabouts, and the fugitives were arrested and brought back to Carroll County before the end of the year.
Strike breakers
By the 1910s, railroad crimes and associated banditry had decreased in the United States. Therefore, Baldwin–Felts began hiring out their detectives as private security forces for mining companies and so the company is remembered for its violent confrontations with the labor unions.
Baldwin–Felts was allowed to maintain such operations because public law enforcement and the maintenance of order in labor disputes were often left to company owners. Therefore, they could employ the likes of Baldwin–Felts to suppress strikes; collect intelligence on unions; prevent labor organizers from entering company grounds; and evict the families of union members living in company-owned housing who had gone on strike or failed to pay rent.
In 1912, Baldwin–Felts agents were soon employed strikebreaking in West Virginia at the Pocohantas Coal Fields and the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek. Their thuggish behaviour and their known propensity for violence led the former Attorney General of West Virginia, Howard B. Lee, to remark in his 1969 book that Baldwin and Felt were the "two most feared and hated men in the mountains."
Between 1913 and 1914, Baldwin–Felts agents had moved west and become involved in another coal field struggle in Las Animas County, Colorado. Agency detectives were employed in squads to harass striking workers. They used an armored car with a mounted machine gun (it was called the Death Special by the miners). Charles Lively, who infiltrated the UMWA in West Virginia and other states, was tasked with spying on the miners in Colorado and killed a man, for which he pleaded self-defense. The events culminated in the violent confrontation known as the Ludlow Massacre.
Battle of Matewan
The most infamous striking breaking action undertaken by the Baldwin–Felts was in Matewan, West Virginia. A confrontation between locals and agents resulted in the deaths of two miners and Matewan's Mayor as well as seven Baldwin–Felts detectives including Thomas Felts' brothers, Albert and Lee.
Final years & closure
Both Baldwin and Felts were also involved in banking, and Baldwin later served as president and member of the board of directors of several banks. Felts was later elected to two terms as a Virginia state senator.
Baldwin died in 1936, at 75; Felts died a year later, at 69. In 1937, four months before his death, Felts had formally dissolved the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency. By then, strikebreaking work had declined. State and federal legislation outlawing the use of private detectives for the purpose of spying on or harassing workers, along with shifting public opinion, had made such detectives less useful to management in labor disputes.
After the agency closed its doors, most of the company's files were destroyed or lost. The largest collection of extant files is housed at the Eastern Regional Coal Archives, in Bluefield, West Virginia.
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