With students heading back to school, I wanted to share a photograph I recently came across during some online research. It comes from a March 1892 magazine story about Pennsylvania’s Coal Region.

The photographer visited the patches and communities around Shenandoah in northern Schuylkill County, and while the school is not identified, that is likely where this image was captured.

This photograph appeared in Demorest’s Family Magazine in March 1892, illustrating Frances Benjamin Johnston’s article “Through the Coal Country with a Camera.”

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Read more about child life in the Coal Region

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

Girls in the Coal Region’s factories – Child labor beyond the mines

A vaccination campaign for schoolchildren in Schuylkill County in the 1850s

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