Thomas Lafayette Felts (16 October 1868–9 September 1937), cofounder of Baldwin-Felts Detectives, Inc., was born in Carroll County and was the son of Creed Felts and Celia E. Edwards Felts. He grew up on the family farm and in 1887 attended Milligan College, in Tennessee. On 23 December 1891 Felts married Elizabeth E. Houseman, also of Carroll County. Before she died on 28 June 1923, they had one son.
About 1890 Felts went to work for Baldwin's Railroad Detectives. He became the partner of the founder, William Gibboney Baldwin, and in February 1911 they incorporated the agency as Baldwin-Felts Detectives, Inc., with Felts as vice president and general manager. They provided security services to railroads and mine operators, initially in western Virginia and West Virginia. Their agents regularly made headlines for solving robbery and murder cases, often on behalf of railroad companies (especially the Norfolk and Western Railway Company), and sometimes working with or for government officials. In 1913 Felts reported that the agency employed several hundred men, and in 1921 he stated that it had representatives stationed in nearly every city in the country. The agency headquarters was in Roanoke, with branch offices in Bluefield and Thurmond, West Virginia. While Felts oversaw the Bluefield office, he maintained a home part of the time in Roanoke and also purchased a large farm and house called Cliffview, near Galax.
Baldwin-Felts and its agents gained further national fame following the gunfight on 14 March 1912 in the Carroll County courthouse, which erupted after Floyd Allen was sentenced to one year in the state penitentiary. Allen's relatives killed four officers of the court before fleeing the scene. Six months later Baldwin-Felts detectives captured two of them, Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards, in Des Moines, Iowa. The agency became best known for its work for coal mine operators. It often placed undercover agents in West Virginia coal mines to observe and report on union activity, information that helped mine owners thwart organizing by the United Mine Workers of America. During strikes the Baldwin-Felts armed guards defended mine property, protected strikebreakers, and evicted workers from company housing. Local law-enforcement officials typically deputized Baldwin-Felts mine guards to give official sanction to their often-violent work.
In 1912 Baldwin-Felts reported that it had provided about 150 armed guards to protect mine property during a strike in the Cabin Creek and Paint Creek areas in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Following several acts of violence and an intense gun battle between strikers and agents at Mucklow, the governor declared martial law. On 7 February 1913 Baldwin-Felts agents aboard an armored railroad car used machine guns to fire on strikers' families living in tents in Holly Grove. Later in 1913 and in 1914 the agency provided armed guards during a strike in Colorado mines. They mounted machine guns on a steel-plated vehicle nicknamed the Death Special, and as violence between guards and strikers grew, Colorado's governor called out the National Guard. On 20 April 1914, in what became known as the Ludlow Massacre, Colorado militiamen (many of them allegedly recent employees of Baldwin-Felts) attacked a strikers' tent colony.
In the spring of 1920 Baldwin-Felts agents evicted striking miners from company housing in Matewan, Mingo County, West Virginia. On 19 May, as the agents prepared to board a train to leave town, an argument between them and the local police chief, Sid Hatfield, escalated into a gun battle known as the Matewan Massacre that left seven Baldwin-Felts agents dead, among them Felts's brothers Albert Felts and Lee Felts. In retaliation, on 1 August 1921 Baldwin-Felts agents shot and killed Hatfield on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse in Welch, West Virginia.
Felts and Baldwin were deeply sympathetic to their corporate clients. Felts, too, was a successful businessman and regarded union activists as Bolshevist radicals. In 1909 he helped found and became president of the First National Bank of Galax. He also served as a director of the Mountain Trust Bank in Roanoke. A staunch Republican, Felts exploited his widespread ties with businessmen and his visibility to run for public office. At times he regarded his home in Bluefield, West Virginia, as his domicile, but his residence near Galax allowed him to be a Virginian when he chose. In 1919 with no Democratic opposition Felts won election to represent Carroll County in the House of Delegates. The Democratic Speaker of the House appointed him to the Committee on Public Property and to the lowest-ranking seats on the Committees on Militia and Police and on Roads and Internal Navigation. While in the assembly, Felts supported improvements to the county's and state's roadways.
Felts did not campaign for reelection in 1921 because, with backing from Galax businessmen, he ran in a special election for the vacant Fifth District seat in the House of Representatives but lost to the Democratic candidate, James Murray Hooker, by a vote of 16,311 to 8,976. Felts easily won election in 1927 to the Senate of Virginia for a four-year term representing Carroll and Grayson Counties. The Democrats who controlled the Senate appointed him to the lowest-ranking seats on the Committees on Enrolled Bills, on Finance, and on Moral, Social and Child Welfare. In February 1928 Felts voted for an antilynching law. He also voted to submit a large number of constitutional amendments to the voters in a referendum, even though he opposed some of them, including the short-ballot amendments reducing the number of state officials that voters could elect. Felts did not seek reelection in 1931.
Several months after Baldwin died, Felts and Baldwin's heirs dissolved the Baldwin-Felts agency in May 1936. While on a visit to Richmond the following year, Thomas Lafayette Felts suffered a stroke and died in one of the city's hospitals on 9 September 1937. He was buried in the Felts Memorial Cemetery, in Galax.
Sources Consulted:
Biography in Duval Porter, Official Virginia: A Composition of Sketches of the Public Men of Virginia at the Present Time (1920), 125; campaign biography in Brief Sketch of the Life of Hon. Thomas L. Felts, Republican Nominee for Congress from the Fifth District of Virginia (1921), with portrait on 1, copy at Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Birth Register, Carroll Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); BVS Marriage Register, Carroll Co.; State Corporation Commission Charter Book 74:261–262, Record Group 112, LVA; Felts papers related to the Matewan Massacre in H. C. Lewis Collection, Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, W.Va.; Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, 63d Cong., 1st sess., hearing on Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia (2, 4, 10–14, 16–18 June 1913), pt. 1, SR 37, pp. 839–887, 890–892, 914–916; Senate, Committee on Education and Labor, 67th Cong., 1st sess., hearing on West Virginia Coal Fields (24 Oct. 1921), SR 80, 2:881–905; Washington Post, 28 Nov. 1898, 17 Feb. 1900, 10 Sept. 1902, 25, 27 Mar. 1912; Brenda McDaniel, "Gun Thugs and Heroes," Roanoker (July/Aug. 1979), 54–61, 79–82; Topper Sherwood, "The Dust Settles: Felts Papers Offer More on Matewan," Goldenseal 17 (summer 1991): 39–44; Randal L. Hall, "A Courtroom Massacre: Politics and Public Sentiment in Progressive-Era Virginia," Journal of Southern History 70 (2004): 266–268; T. R. C. Hutton, "Sleuthing for Mr. Crow: Detective William Baldwin and the Business of White Supremacy," Journal of Southern History 85 (2019): 285–320; Stephen H. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (2002), 128–148, 163–169; Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A History of Commercialized Strikebreaking and Unionbusting in the United States (2003), 22–38; BVS Death Certificate, Richmond City; obituaries in Richmond News Leader and Roanoke World-News (portrait), both 10 Sept. 1937, and Richmond Times-Dispatch and Roanoke Times, both 11 Sept. 1937; editorial tribute in Roanoke Times, 11 Sept. 1937.
1928 Legislative photograph courtesy Visual Studies Collection, Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Randal L. Hall.
How to cite this page:
Randal L. Hall, "Thomas Lafayette Felts (1868–1937}," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Felts_Thomas_Lafayette, accessed [today's date]).
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