Breaker Boys: Children in the Coal

Near McDade Park on the northern edge of Scranton, you are not far from where several large coal breakers once stood, the massive wooden structures where raw coal was crushed, sorted, and made ready for market. Inside those buildings, for decades, children worked.

They were called breaker boys. Most were between eight and twelve years old, though some were as young as six, hired with falsified paperwork when laws proved inconvenient. They sat hunched over fast-moving conveyor belts and chutes, reaching into the rushing coal to pull out pieces of slate and rock, hour after hour, for ten hours a day, six days a week.

The noise inside a coal breaker was described by observers as almost beyond human tolerance, a continuous roar of machinery and grinding stone. The coal dust was everywhere. It burned the boys' eyes and filled their lungs. Their fingers bled daily from contact with sharp slate edges on moving belts. Those belts also claimed fingers, hands, and arms when a boy's sleeve caught in the machinery. Some boys fell into the chutes and were crushed. Their bodies were often not recovered until the shift ended.

Pennsylvania passed a law in eighteen eighty-five forbidding the employment of anyone under twelve in a coal breaker. Operators and desperate families found ways around it. The practice did not effectively end until the National Child Labor Committee sent photographer Lewis Hine into the coal fields around nineteen ten and nineteen eleven. Hine's photographs, stark and unflinching, showed the nation what it had been permitting. The images became famous. Congress could not look away indefinitely.

By nineteen twenty most breaker boys were gone from the coal region. They had been replaced partly by machines and partly by the slow pressure of public conscience, provoked by photographs that refused to stay polite. The boys themselves, the ones who survived, carried the coal dust in their lungs for the rest of their lives.