At the end of a shift in Pennsylvania’s anthracite breakers, the work wasn’t finished when the whistle blew – there was still a day’s worth of coal dust to deal with.
This newspaper photograph from around 1900 captures a group of breaker boys washing up after a day spent sorting rock from coal in the mines of Pennsylvania’s Coal Region.
Some of these boys were as young as eight years old. They crouched for hours over moving conveyor belts in dust-choked rooms, pulling slate and rock from the coal stream by hand, their fingers cut and blackened by the end of every shift.
The breaker was one of the more dangerous places in the anthracite industry – deafening, suffocating, and unforgiving to small hands working too close to moving machinery. Foremen walked the rows with sticks to keep boys from slowing down.
Breaker boys in Pennsylvania were a fixture of the anthracite coal industry from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century, cheap labor that kept the region’s collieries running at full capacity. The breaker boys later became the face of efforts to end child labor in the United States.
You can read more about the breaker boys here.
Read more Coal Region history
A breaker boy’s memory of a childhood at work | Llewelyn Evans in 1943
“These boys are in constant danger” – A description of the child laborers of the Coal Region | 1902
“A lonely job” – A photograph of a child mineworker at work in Pittston, Pennsylvania | 1911
Subscribe to the latest from Jake Wynn – Public Historian
Enter your email below to receive the newest stories.
My grandfather started working as a breaker boy at the age of nine. I appreciate how you write about that period of our local history with accuracy providing us with original articles and photographs.