Baldwin was born in the since historical community of Half Rock in Mercer County in northern Missouri. His mother, the former Lucinda Ellen Garriott, a native of Keokuk County, Iowa, died in Half Rock in 1890, when Roy was five years of age. Marion Baldwin remarried and relocated to Washington County near Portland in northwestern Oregon, where he died shortly thereafter at the age of about forty-four, when Roy was seventeen. Baldwin married the former Maude Hollinger. The couple had two children, Garriott Thompson "Zeke" Baldwin and Elizabeth Maude Baldwin Baker.
Political life
On August 30, 1919, Baldwin won a special election for House District 122 to succeed his fellow Democrat, William H. Bledsoe of Lubbock, who was elected to the Texas State Senate. Baldwin did not take his oath of office until May 20, 1920. In 1923, as barely a third term member of the legislature, Baldwin joined with Senator Bledsoe to support Senate Bill 103, with a $1 million appropriation, to establish a four-year educational institution in West Texas with an emphasis on agricultural research. The school would be separate from Texas A&M University in College Station, which had a similar mission and whose leadership opposed the new institution. Bledsoe confessed to having drawn up the requirements for the host city to fit only Lubbock, which was selected over thirty-six other locations, including San Angelo, Midland, Plainview, Brownwood, Lampasas, Big Spring, and even Boerne in Kendall County barely northwest of San Antonio. Vernon, west of Wichita Falls, claimed it should be selected because of its railroad access; at the time Vernon had more than one thousand more people than Lubbock. Though the site selection committee traveled to all the communities seeking to become the location of the new college, but the fix was in from the start. To win the competition, Lubbock was allowed to amend its initial application to account for eighty more acres so that it could meet the two thousand acres required in the legislation for the chosen location. In time, Texas Tech, originally Texas Technological College, helped to make Lubbock the largest city of West Texas, excluding El Paso in the far southwestern corner of the state. Representative Richard M. Chitwood, the chairman of the House Education Committee, thought his city of Sweetwater in Nolan County far better suited for the new institution as the "central" location of West Texas. When Lubbock was chosen, Chitwood was given a patronage consolation as business manager of the new institution. Chitwood was the business manager of Texas Tech for only fifteen months; he died in November 1926 in a Dallas hotel. Baldwin died in 1940 at the age of fifty-five; he is interred at Englewood Cemetery in Slaton. His grave marker reads: "Jurist-Author-Legislator; Co-Author of Bill Creating Texas Technological College".
