Baldwin-Felts

The Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency was a private detective agency in the United States.

Today it is most remembered for its violent confrontations with labor union members in such places as the Pocahontas Coalfield region of West Virginia, the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, and in Ludlow, Colorado leading up to the Ludlow Massacre. Further members of the agency were central actors in the events that lead to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The agency was founded in the early 1890s by William Gibbony Baldwin as the Baldwin Detective Agency.

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 in order 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 & Western Railway’s coalfield district, later being 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, headquartered in Bluefield, West Virginia.

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