Stephen Baldwin: The West Virginian Behind The Real West Virginia

Story by Greg Johnson | Photography Courtesy of Stephen Baldwin and Will Price

Twenty-six years ago, a tall, ginger-haired, mild-mannered, thoughtful young man stepped up to the microphone at the West Virginia State Fairgrounds and delivered a speech at the commencement ceremony for the Greenbrier East High School Class of 2000. He’d earned the honor as the Student Body President, and he chose to spend his few minutes talking about the importance of trying to appreciate the beauty in life.

Today, as the publisher of The Real West Virginia, and pastor of Ronceverte Presbyterian Church and Clifton Presbyterian Church in Maxwelton, in many ways Stephen Baldwin is still delivering the same positive message.

Over the past quarter century Stephen has been a pastor, a school board member, a member of the House of Delegates, a State Senator, the Senate Minority Leader, a writer, and, more recently, the founder of a nonprofit online newspaper with a million monthly views. More privately he’s a husband, a father, a runner and a golfer. His writing spotlights others, but those who know him agree he’s at least as interesting as his subjects.

Stephen’s Greenbrier County roots go back several generations. His maternal grandfather, Ernest Cobb, was a popular local doctor and one of the founders of Greenbrier Physicians. His father Steve was Director of Retail at The Greenbrier, overseeing the resort’s shops. His mother Jane worked for nonprofits - the Family Refuge Center, CASA and Communities in Schools.

An avid golfer from a young age, Stephen decided to attend college where he could play the sport, Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. As luck had it, he met a young woman from Florida, Kerry Richardson, who had also chosen the school for its golfing opportunities. They ended up being more interested in each other. They quit the school’s golf team after a semester, and they married in 2007. Today Kerry is an independent realtor, affiliated with Grist Real Estate in Lewisburg.

Academically, Stephen focused on two subjects that had always interested him, political science and religion. After graduating from Queens, he decided to enter the ministry, and he earned a Master of Divinity degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Returning to Greenbrier County, he accepted a call to serve as pastor of Ronceverte Presbyterian Church, a position he has held for the past 19 years. If you ask his congregation about his greatest strength, they mention pastoral care, a natural extension of his congenial, others-focused personality.

In 2012 Stephen was elected to the Greenbrier County Board of Education, where he served until 2016. One of his happiest memories was being invited to serve as a judge for a talent show at Western Greenbrier Middle School, and he still smiles when he describes it. One of his frustrations was discovering that most school-related policies were beyond local control, dictated on the state level. After talking it over with his fellow school board members, he decided to leave the board a few months before his term expired to run for the House of Delegates.

He won his election and in 2017 he was a year into his two-year term when Senator Ron Miller retired and Stephen was appointed to replace him. A year later he ran for this office and he won a four-year term. One of his campaign pledges was not to accept support from lobbyists, and, determined to live up to it, he chased one out of his office. “Looking back on it, it was probably a mistake to go in guns blazing like that,” he says ruefully. “I discovered lobbyists have their place. You can learn a lot from folks who are specialists in certain areas. Later on, there were actually some I would seek out to learn about issues.” As a legislator his areas of focus were reforming the foster care system, flood recovery, expanding broadband service, public health and economic development.

When he ran for re-election in 2022 the political climate in West Virginia had changed dramatically. “I think I wasn’t re-elected because of the D beside my name. A friend recently said JFK couldn’t get elected in Southern West Virginia now.” It’s an interesting observation. Many past Greenbrier County legislators were Democrats—Ron Miller, Sarah Lee Neal, Betty Crookshanks and Robert Holliday (who introduced the bill that abolished the death penalty in West Virginia). Nowadays none are.

He views the loss as a blessing in disguise. “I was in Charleston or traveling the state all the time. I was spending more time on public service than on the church. My health was terrible, and I attribute it to the stress of politics. When you’re an officeholder you lose your privacy. People come up to you in public and say the weirdest things, some highly inappropriate. I had to go away to have privacy or space.”

Losing the election caused him to re-evaluate how he was spending his time and consider what should come next. Ever since his days on the school board he had been writing a column called The Back Pew, reporting on the goings on in the school system and state legislature. The column appeared in The West Virginia Daily News and The Mountain Messenger, and eventually online. He decided he wanted to continue writing, and he teamed up with a friend in Charleston, Matthew Young, to launch an online publication called The Real West Virginia. Their goal was to shine a spotlight on West Virginians who were doing interesting things, especially those whose efforts to help keep their communities together were unsung. “There’s a lot of unreported good news, and we wanted people to hear about the good things going on in the state. We also realized we were creating a platform where we could try to hold people in positions of leadership accountable for their actions.”

They set up their online project as a nonprofit corporation, supported by grants, advertising and donations. Stephen pays his writers, but he has never taken a dime from the nonprofit himself. The writing team is always evolving; the current mainstays are Matthew Young in Charleston, Autumn Shelton in Beckley, Vanta Coda in Martinsburg, Jenny Harnish and Dakota Baker in the Greenbrier Valley, Star Buckner in Nicholas County, and Anna Knapp in Huntington.

“There’s a lot of unreported good news, and we wanted people to hear about the good things going on in the state. We also realized we were creating a platform where we could try to hold people in positions of leadership accountable for their actions.”

The online paper is distributed via its own website, and social media. Since it launched in 2022, The Real West Virginia has published over 8,000 articles, usually more than five daily. What readers see on their social media feeds depends on their location and their friend network; the sites’ algorithms make those decisions. Someone in Lewisburg isn’t likely to see stories about Martinsburg unless they happen to have friends there. The stories are also picked up by Apple News, NewsBreak and SmartNews, popular AI-driven news aggregation apps. All in all, they get about a million views each month.

“Forty of the 55 counties in our state are considered news deserts,” Stephen observes. “Places that get little or no local news coverage. Much of Appalachia falls in the same category. We have a two-year grant from a national organization called Press Forward that steps in to help supply news to those communities. The Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation has also been very supportive with grants.”

The Baldwin family—Stephen, Kerry and their nine-year-old son Harrison—have a cabin on Peters Mountain in Monroe County where they escape. “Part of it is an early Mark Bowe cabin,” Stephen points out, “one he built before he became TV personality Mark Bowe of Barnwood Builders.” From their tranquil vantage point on the mountain, they watch one of their neighbors, retired Greenbrier East teacher Barry Rich, paragliding.

I don’t usually end articles with personal notes from the author, but in this case I’ll make an exception. I’ve known Stephen ever since he was a little kid. He went through school with our son Nick, and his sister Ali was in the same class as our daughter Sarah. They were friends and frequent visitors at our home. Remarkably, Stephen Baldwin, now 44, has been essentially the same person all of his life—bright, observant, even-tempered, soft-spoken and concerned about others. I was at the graduation where he made the speech mentioned in the first paragraph. Whatever he does, he always does well.