ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 15, 1997 TAG: 9704150049
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
IF YOU call Ernest F. Reynolds on the phone and ask if he is an authority on the now-gone Baldwin-Felts detective agency of Roanoke, he might say, as he did recently: "You're damned right I am."
And when you go by the roomy stucco house on Westover Avenue Southwest to talk about it, Reynolds brings the bowler-hatted, pistol-carrying, ruthless Baldwin-Felts agents alive. (Being alive was not a condition most Virginia, West Virginia or Colorado miners desired in a Baldwin-Felts man.)
Reynolds was born in McDowell County, W.Va., and came to Roanoke "a half-hour out of high school" to attend National Business College.
He worked as a West Virginia coal company accountant and as an accountant/security man in Harlan County, Ky. In Kentucky, he was an office man by day and "a pistolero by night."
In 1955, he and his wife, Susan, moved to Roanoke, leaving behind the coalfields, and Reynolds got into the hydraulic repair business.
He has seen the Baldwin-Felts people up close - first encountering them because they all worked out of his father's office in Mercer County, W.Va. His father, Bill Reynolds, was a deputy sheriff and a justice of the peace.
And thus, he has a pleasant obsession with what some people called the "Baldwin-Feltsers."
Reynolds, who has been into a lot of enterprises in 80 years, is now a free-lance writer for newspapers and magazines - including the West Virginia Hillbilly.
In bow tie and sweater and looking like an obliging, benevolent circuit court clerk in a bygone day, Reynolds has a small library/museum in the basement that resembles a long-ago clerk's office. Except for the computer and the copier - which show that Reynolds himself is not bygone.
Old coal-mining equipment is everywhere, and upstairs, Reynolds has two pistols and a rifle that date back to the times when the Baldwin-Felts people reigned in the coalfields.
In the era between the turn of the century and the 1930s, these men shot, evicted or did other cruel things to the miner. They were hired by coal interests as mine guards and, if they were ruthless, they also were colorful and maybe even charming at times.
Before the 1893 riot in the city of
Roanoke, as Reynolds will tell you, William G. Baldwin, one of the founders of the agency, rode his horse into a group of Roanokers intent on lynching a black man, threw the suspect across his saddle and rode him to safety at the city jail. The man was said to have beaten and robbed a white farmer's wife on the City Market.
The gallantry went for nothing. A mob got to the suspect at the height of the riot and hanged him anyway. But there is something knightly in what Baldwin did that day.
And there is Hughey Lucas, whose secret number as an agent was 13, and who sometimes staged his own death for strategic reasons, but always seemed to turn up again. Hughey apparently was not knightly.
Reynolds wrote: "No historic character had been sighted [after his reported death] more often than Lucas until shorn of the title by Elvis the Pelvis."
Reynolds, who has been into a lot of enterprises in 80 years, is now a free-lance writer for newspapers and magazines - including the West Virginia Hillbilly. He admitted a particular obsession with Hughey.
In his writings, Reynolds has said that there is something wrong with a West Virginia death certificate that says Hughey died March 6, 1932, of a "gun shot wound to the head." The certificate spells the name as "Hughie."
There is no address given on the certificate. It says that Hughey was born in Virginia, was married and was of the age of "50 years, 10 months and 21 days." The parents, address, and occupation blanks are empty - as are most of the blanks. The certificate doesn't even say where Hughey is buried or who buried him.
Reynolds wrote that he saw Hughey in the post office and magistrate's office in Montcalm, W.Va., and at the magistrate's office there long after the death certificate date.
Reynolds has a pair of leather leggings of the kind the Baldwin-Felts men wore with the number 13 in them. That was Hughey's secret operative number. Hughey polished the leggings with such devotion, Reynolds said, that you "could see to shave in them"
Hughey, Reynolds said fondly, would be reported dead and then at some coalfield confrontation there would be Operative 13. They'd have him dead "maybe as much as five or six times" and then he'd rear up "scarin' 'em half to death."
He was one of the Baldwin-Felts team that went to Des Moines, Iowa, to arrest Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards - the last two men wanted in the 1912 Hillsville courthouse gun battle that killed five people.
It is said that Hughey once by himself quelled a sort of hostage strike put on by nonunion miners. When he got on the scene, he was asked where the rest of the men were, and he wanted to know how many strikes were going on - a sort of one-riot-one-Texas Ranger approach.
Reynolds also knows of the exploits of agents with names like "High Pockets" Moore and "Dry Bones" Boyd and he has known coalfield people such as "Icey" Watkins, the wife of "Poker Jim" Watkins. "Icey" cooked for the hotel in Montcalm, W.Va.
There was "Peggy" Dwyer, a male union organizer with one natural leg. The Baldwin-Felts people wanted "Peggy" out of the way to the extent "they'd blown him up several times."
One night in the 1930s, Reynolds reported for the new job in Harlan County, Ky., for years the citadel of coalfield violence. Reynolds checked into a hotel before learning that the mine guards were going to interrupt a union meeting there.
There was gun smoke and shouting and "Peggy" Dwyer "hobbled across the tracks" and took up temporary, urgent residence in a bordello.
William G. Baldwin and T.L. Felts founded the agency about the turn of the century, and in a few years it had grown in size to include offices in Roanoke, Bluefield, W.Va., Denver, Richmond and Thurmond, W.Va.
Its stationery at its high point was strangely fancy - ``Baldwin-Felts Detectives, Inc.'' printed in red ink. It was the agent for five railroads, including the old Norfolk and Western.
The stationery made it plain: "No divorce cases taken."
Strangely, the shooting at the Hillsville courthouse - a tragedy for the state of Virginia - gave the agency some respectability.
Acting more like lawmen than anti-union goons, the agents rode far and wide looking for the people wanted in the shooting. The state of Virginia paid them.
But in the coalfields, they were thugs and coal company policemen who evicted widows, probably didn't like orphans, shot people regularly and acted like they were the law.
And it was in the coalfields that the agency had its worst day on May 19, 1920, at Matewan, W.Va., when Matewan locals led by Chief of Police Sid Hatfield killed seven Baldwin-Felts men in a main-street shoot-out. The dead included two of T.L. Felts' brothers, Albert and Lee. Dead on the other side were the mayor and two miners.
Reynolds said he has seen the movie "Matewan" and concluded: "It wasn't much. That was a farce. Although some of it was pretty good."
The movie goes along with tradition: that the gunfight occurred because 13 detectives came to town and evicted a number of mining families.
"The whole fight was about the liquor and prostitution business," Reynolds said.
Later, Sid Hatfield would be shot down at the courthouse in Welch, W.Va., at which event Hughey Lucas was present.
This was the time of the Mingo County wars, when the federal government sent troops to the county to put down a miner's rebellion.
Eventually, an agreement between the miners and coal companies ended the era of the mine-guard system, and soon the Baldwin-Felts agency would be no more. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gets the blame for that.
The Baldwin-Felts people "were mercenaries," Reynolds said. "They'd do what they were paid to do."
Still, the image persists of William G. Baldwin on a faithful horse - ideally rearing and wild-eyed - temporarily rescuing a man from lynch justice.
LENGTH: Long : 150 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CINDY PINKSTON. 1. Reynolds shows off a Model 90by CNBWinchester lever-action rifle that his father acquired in 1920. 2. A
pair of circa-1890 .44-caliber Smith & Wesson Specials (above) with
71/2-inch barrels was secured for Reynold's father, a deputy
sheriff, by Baldwin-Felts detective J.B. Mosby. 3. Agent Mosby later
was killed in a pool room in Matoaka, W.Va. Reynolds (left)
maintains a clear-eyed view of his subject: ``They'd do what they
were paid to do'' color. 4. Ernest Reynolds' collection includes
this early miner's hat, which is made of cancas.
BEN BEAGLE/THE ROANOKE TIMES