Ivy Baldwin was born William Ivy on July 31, 1866, in Houston, Texas. He joined the circus as a boy, learning to walk the tightrope, and by the late 1870s was performing with the Thayer Dollar Circus. He later teamed up with performers Thomas and Sam Baldwin, adopting the stage name “Ivy Baldwin” so he could be billed alongside them as “The Baldwin Brothers.” Together they thrilled crowds with high-wire acts, hot-air balloon ascensions, and daring parachute jumps from handmade balloons that climbed as high as 2,500 feet.
Baldwin became one of the most popular and enduring attractions at Elitch’s Zoological Gardens in Denver. From 1890 to 1907, he made a balloon ascension nearly every Saturday and Sunday of the summer season, rising high above the Gardens and often performing acrobatic stunts on a trapeze suspended beneath the balloon as it climbed. Mary Elitch herself recalled joining Baldwin for a balloon ascent in 1890, his first year at the gardens.
Mary Elitch was quoted as saying: “Mr. Long and I were the first passengers to soar into the Colorado sky. I must confess there were some apprehensive gasps as the starting whistle blew, but our fears soon gave place to a feeling of power and security as we ascended… From the great height of fifteen hundred feet, all Denver and its environs of mountains and plains lay spread before our entranced vision.”
[Dier, Caroline L. The Lady of the Gardens : Mary Elitch Long. 1932]
In 1902 he added a new thrill to his act, parachuting to earth from the balloon. Baldwin’s routine was not without peril: on one Fourth of July performance, his suit caught fire as he slid down the balloon’s rope, and he spent the following week recovering from his burns. He had ordered a protective asbestos suit for just such an occasion, but it failed to arrive in time.
Beyond his summers at Elitch’s, Baldwin led a remarkable career in early American aviation. In 1894 he was recruited by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, joining as a sergeant to help pilot and maintain the Army’s experimental observation balloons. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, Baldwin piloted a hot-air balloon that relayed the location of Spanish snipers to American troops ahead of the Battle of San Juan Hill, an act that has led some to credit him as the first aviator shot down in wartime service, after his balloon was struck and came down in the Aguadores River. Following his honorable discharge, Baldwin returned to show business billing himself as “the air hero of the late War” and even sold pieces of the downed balloon as souvenirs.
Over the course of his career he was credited with more than 2,500 balloon ascensions and a comparable number of parachute drops, and he later built and flew his own biplanes, reportedly surviving nineteen crashes. He is recognized as the first person to fly a powered aircraft in Colorado, and in 1910 he became the first to successfully fly an airplane in Nevada, an achievement honored by the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame.
In his later years, Baldwin settled in Eldorado Canyon in Boulder County, Colorado, where he became famous for a different kind of high-wire feat: a 125-foot tightrope crossing strung high above South Boulder Creek. He walked the wire above the canyon and the Eldorado Springs resort many times over four decades, and on his 82nd birthday he marked the occasion with what would be his final crossing, a walk he had by then made some 80 times. It was a fitting capstone to a lifetime spent defying gravity, whether beneath a balloon over Elitch’s Gardens or on a wire above a Colorado canyon.
Ivy Baldwin died peacefully at his home in Eldorado Canyon on October 8, 1953, at the age of 87 — not in the balloon or high-wire mishap many might have expected, but in his sleep. In 1969 he was named an inaugural inductee of the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, honored alongside nine other pioneering Colorado aviators for a career that combined genuine aeronautical achievement with the showmanship of a born entertainer. For the generations of Denver families who watched him rise above the Gardens each summer weekend, though, Ivy Baldwin would always be remembered first as Elitch’s own daredevil of the sky.
