Hellraisers Journal: From McClure’s Magazine: “Children of the Coal Shadow” by Francis H. Nichols, Part II

Mother Jones Quote ed, Suffer Little Children, CIR p10641, May 14, 1915 —————

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday February 11, 1903
Children of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite “Coal Shadow”
-Part II of article by Francis H. Nichols, with illustrations by Frank E. Schoonover

From McClure’s Magazine of February 1903:

CHILDREN OF THE COAL SHADOW

BY FRANCIS H. NICHOLS

Illustrated by Frank E. Schoonover

[Part II of III]

The School of the “Breaker”

The company’s nurseries for boys of the coal shadow are the grim black buildings called breakers, where the lump coal from the blast is crushed into marketable sizes…..Between the [coal] chutes are boys. All day long their little fingers dip into the unending grimy steam that rolls past them…..

…..In front of the chutes is an open space reserved for the “breaker boss,” who watches the boys as intently as they watch the coal.

The boss is armed with a stick, with which he occasionally raps on the head and shoulders a boy who betrays lack of zeal…..

A Boys’ Union Meeting

At Harwood [Pennsylvania], a village about four miles from Hazelton, I attended a meeting of a Junior Local. Promptly at eight o’clock the boys, about fifty in number, gathered in the schoolhouse. Their oily caps and grimy overalls gave evidence of their having only recently left their day’s toil in the mines and breakers. After the blinds had been drawn, and the door locked, the president mounted the teacher’s platform and called the meeting to order by pounding on the desk with his fist. On the front row of benches sat the vice-president, treasurer, and secretary. Comparatively few of the members who filled the benches in the room would have been pronounced by any observer of ordinary perspicacity outside the perjured world of Anthracite as being more than ten years of age……

[Emphasis added.]