In 1911, renowned activist photographer Lewis W. Hine arrived in Pittston, Pennsylvania, documenting the harsh reality of child labor in the anthracite coal fields for the National Child Labor Committee. His mission was clear: to expose the exploitation of young mineworkers and reveal the widespread abuse of Pennsylvania’s lax child labor laws.

One of Hine’s most striking images from that visit shows a young boy seated on a loaded mine car, deep within the #6 Shaft of the Pennsylvania Coal Company. That boy was Joseph Puma.

Hine’s notes provide critical details about Puma’s identity and circumstances:

“Small boy is Jo Puma, a Nipper, 163 Pine Street. Jo’s mother showed me the passport which shows Jo to be 14 years old, but he has no school certificate, although working inside the mine.”

As a “nipper,” Puma’s job was to assist miners and laborers as they went about their tasks in the dark mine. Like thousands of other immigrant children in Pennsylvania’s anthracite mines, his days were long, exhausting, and dangerous.

Puma was born in the community of Montedoro in central Sicily in January 1896 or 1897. A decade later, his family emigrated from Italy to the United States and arrived in Luzerne County.

In the 1910 census, the Puma and young Joseph lived on Railroad Street in Pittston and Puma worked deep within the mines as a door tender. Door tenders in the mine opened and closed doors within a mine to keep the flow of air to properly ventilate the workings.

A year later, Hine’s photographs show Puma working with a crew of older men as a nipper at the #6 Shaft.

The historical record loses track of Joseph Puma until 1918, when he registered for the draft for World War I in Buffalo, New York, but registered as a resident of Pittston, PA where his family still lived. Puma went to war in 1918 and served as a cook in a medical unit in Europe from 1918 to 1919.

In the years after the war, he returned to the United States and lived in New York City where he married Angelina Palazzolo in November 1923.

By 1930, Puma and a growing family had returned to 163 Pine Street in Pittston where he was recorded as living as a boy by Lewis Hine in 1911. He worked as a truck driver in Pittston.

Puma later settled in Geneva, New York with his family, where he died in 1965. He’s buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in the city of Buffalo.

Through Lewis Hine’s lens, we catch a fleeting glimpse of a child mineworker’s life – a boy trapped in the cycle of immigrant labor in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region. But history shows us that Joseph Puma’s story didn’t end in the mines. He survived the dangers of child labor, served his country, and built a life beyond the darkness of the mines in the anthracite fields.

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Read more about child labor in the Coal Region

Photographs document life of a child amputee of Pennsylvania’s anthracite mines | 1909

“Children of the Coal Shadow” – A haunting report about the children of the Coal Region from 1903

A photograph of breaker boys at Pittston, Pennsylvania | January 1911

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