The coal mining operation at Williamstown, Pennsylvania was one of the largest operations in this part of Pennsylvania, employing more than 1,000 workers including dozens of boys as young as 8-years-old.

This photograph shows the children mineworkers – breaker boys – employed at the Williamstown Colliery in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields at the turn of the 20th century.

The boys worked in the breaker, the coal processing facility near the mine’s opening where coal was sorted from rock by shakers, rollers, and… with the use of small hands and fingers.

They worked from dawn to dusk amid clouds of coal dust and roaring machinery, cutting their hands on jagged rocks and sitting above moving conveyor.

Many of these boys would graduate from the breaker to a life of work in the depths of the region’s anthracite coal mines.

In the decades that followed, Pennsylvania enacted increasingly tighter child labor laws to designed protect the children of the Keystone State from such dangerous working conditions.

---

Read more about the breaker boys of the Coal Region

The Breaker Boys of Pennsylvania – Child Labor in the Coal Region

A breaker boy’s memory of a childhood at work | Llewelyn Evans in 1943

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

---