This illustration appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1863 accompanying an article about a trip through Pennsylvania’s Coal Region. In this view, we see a relatively crude early version of a coal breaker designed to sort valuable coal from worthless slate and rock. The author visited the Oxford Colliery in Scranton, Pennsylvania as the coal industry boomed during the Civil War.

“Breaker boys” can be seen doing the risky and tedious labor.

These breakers and their incessant noise became a hallmark vision of the Coal Region in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Here’s the author’s full description of the breaker at work:

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At the summit of the slope, or directly above the shaft, a tall slender structure is erected, which contains the machinery for raising, breaking, and sorting the coal, and is usually called a “coal breaker.” As one of these collieries answers for all, we will examine the Oxford shaft and breaker, which, besides being near at hand, has also the latest mechanical improvements.

The first room which we enter contains the stationary engine, whose office is to raise the coal up the shaft, and turn the breaker. The coal is carried up to the top of the structure from the mine in deep carts, holding four or five tons each. Let us ascend to this topmost room, and we shall see the coal as it comes from the hands of the miner. Here is a laborer, who stands by, and as the car reaches the top takes out from it a card upon which is the name of the miner to whom the load is to be accredited.

For each load mined the miner receives about seventy-two cents; and in this way he often earns from $60 to $80 per month. The coal is here “dumped off” into a shute, which conveys it to the “landing,” where there are other laborers stationed to break the larger pieces, it passes on to the rollers of the breaker, which receiving it between their toothed surfaces, crush it, just as it happens, into various shapes and sizes.

From the rollers the coal is passed down into screens, which allow its different sizes to pass through their correspondingly different apertures. After being “screened” the coal is passed through various shutes, at the bottom of which railway cars are stationed to receive it; when, over lateral railways, it is conveyed to the coal-yard of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, or to the Lackawanna and Bloomsburg Railroad, to be shipped to market.

While passing through the last-named shuts the coal is separated from the slate with which it is mixed. This process is intrusted to lads of from four to ten years of age; and to those who look for the picturesque features of a colliery the slate-picking room is the most interesting of all. Nothing can be more amusing than the expression of countenance and the movements of these little fellows, nothing more ludicrous than their ragged and ungainly habiliments. They seem rather to be amusing themselves than working, as they lazily pick out and drop underneath the pieces of slate- rock, which the casual visitor could not tell from the genuine coal, but which they detect by a sort of indolent intuition.

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Read more about breaker boys in the Coal Region

“Children of the mine” – The Coal Region’s breaker boys at work

“The Breaker Boy” – A poem from 1897 about the child laborers of 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

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