While breaker boys spent their days sorting coal in the dust-filled breakers, their sisters labored in factories. Across Pennsylvania’s Coal Region, knitting mills and silk factories became a major employer of young girls, offering low wages in exchange for long hours of grueling work.
A 1903 article in McClure’s Magazine, titled “Children of the Coal Shadow,” revealed the harsh realities of child labor beyond the mines:
While the miner’s son is working in the breaker or mine it is probably that his daughter is employed in a mill or factory.
Sometimes in a mining town, sometimes in a remote part of the coal fields, one comes upon a large, substantial building of wood or brick.
When the six o’clock whistle blows, its front door is opened , and out streams a procession of girls. Some of them are apparently 17 or 18 years old, the majority are from 13 to 16, but quite a number would seem to be considerably less than 13.
Such a building is one of the knitting mills or silk factories that during the last ten years have come into Anthracite. Underwear and men’s socks are now manufactured in large quantities near many of the mining towns.
This report exposed how hundreds of young girls – some no older than 10 or 11 – spent their youth in these mills, earning meager wages to help support their struggling families.
By the late 19th century, industrial expansion in Northeastern Pennsylvania extended beyond coal. Mills and textile factories followed, capitalizing on cheap labor from mining families, where entire households depended on multiple incomes. There was a surplus of young female workers, who had limited alternatives for employment outside of domestic work or teaching.
The region’s railroad connections gave it an advantage as well, allowing goods like hosiery, silk products, and knitwear to be shipped to Philadelphia, New York, and beyond.
These mills boomed in the 1890s and early 1900s, establishing factories in and around Hazleton, Shenandoah, Shamokin, Wilkes-Barre, and Scranton, and many other mining towns up and down the Coal Region.
The workers in these factories and mills faced their own dangers from dust and machinery, working long hours for little pay and fought for better conditions alongside their family and friends who worked the anthracite mines.
Read the full 1903 McClure’s Magazine article here
Read more about women in the Coal Region
Protest blocks the streets of Tower City, Pennsylvania | 1958
“Life in the Coal Villages” | 1888
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