Breaker boy

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A breaker boy is a person whose job is to separate coal from slate rock in coal breakers. Historically, the job was done by young boys, or older boys who couldn't work as chimney sweeps anymore. The job was very unhealthy and dirty due to exposure to anthracite. The boys were one of the main topics of progressives against child labor in the USA.

Breakers are structures where coal is prepared for coal consumers. While today's breakers are modern, mechanized facilities, in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century coal mines, breakers were grim, black buildings where lumps of coal were crushed and then sorted by size. In its November 1906 issue, Cosmopolitan Magazine described vividly the coal breakers, indigenous to the anthracite coal fields: "High-piled dumps of culm . . . stretch in lifeless table-lands around the belching breakers that are forever vomiting forth more dead matter to stifle the discouraged life of all green and growing things. . . . Hideous, unstable looking 'breakers' loom beside the spuming pits."

Coal moved from the mine pit to the cupola of the breaker where it was dumped into a heavy machine, a large perforated drum described by one writer as "a cyclopean cylinder." The drum broke or crushed the coal, which then fell through different size perforations into chutes that carried it to the ground floor. There it was loaded onto waiting wagons or freight cars. As the coal poured down the chutes, breaker boys sorted through the flowing black rivers to pick slate and rock from the coal.

The chutes, about three feet apart, zigzagged through the building, and the breaker boys, seated on boards laid across the chutes, controlled the flow of coal by moving their feet in the chute.

Is was difficult to tell the difference between the dark-colored slate and the black coal, and the breaker boys could detect the difference only by close scrutiny. They had to bend low over the chutes as they worked, picking slate and slag from the crushed coal as it poured past them to the cars waiting below. As a consequence, the breaker boys, some as young as eight years of age and others very old men, developed round shoulders and narrow chests.

One observer described the boys thus: "Cramped like Hindu idols, aged and blackened as the gargoyles of Notre Dame, rows and rows of these humped-up boys and broken-down old men sit beside the cataracts of coal, watching and snatching at the slate sweeping by in the black stream. All day long their little fingers dip into the unending grimy stream that rolls past them."

An open space in front of the chutes was reserved for a "breaker boss" who, armed with a stick, occasionally whacked the head and shoulders of any boy who betrayed a "lack of zeal."

Working in the breaker was a dirty business. A wet process to clean coal was available and would have greatly improved working conditions for the breaker boys, but the necessary machinery was expensive, and mine owners was were not interested in the comfort of their workers. That improvement was made only where the coal was so dirty that dry cleaning was impossible.

In breakers where coal was cleaned dry, dust was so dense that, according to one writer, "Light cannot penetrate, and even on bright days the breaker boys are compelled to wear mine lamps in their little caps to enable them to see the coal at their feet. On sultry days the dust cloud is often seen hanging like a heavy pall above the great coal breaker for an hour after the work of the day is done." Another author claimed that when the coal was cleaned dry, "Dust from the ever-rushing, bumping river rises in a black fog that envelops the pickers, clogging every air-passage, getting into the skin, burning into the eyes--a fog that hangs darkly above the breakers long after the day is done." A different account states that the boys all wore miner's lamps that "made a little flickering halo of light misting about each wizened face. But in spite of the lamps, a twilight of flying dust hovers over the breakers." Steam pipes mounted on the walls were supposed to heat the breakers in winter. But when the weather was cold, heat was needed in the mines and was transferred there. The dark breakers were extremely cold. From November to May, breaker boys who had them always wore overcoats and caps with tippets (a long cloth attached to the cap). But because they relied largely on their sense of touch, breaker boys could not wear mittens or gloves. The coal, rubbing constantly against their hands, made their fingers bleed and their nails tear down to the quick.

Breaker boys worked long hours under those conditions--and for a low wage. They were supposed to work only from seven in the morning until noon and from one to six in the afternoon. But when the mine was running at full capacity, the noon break was cut to half an hour, and quitting time often was not until 6:30 in the evening. Despite that, the breaker boys were paid only for ten hours work. According to the records in 1903, when he began work at slate picking "a boy receives forty cents a day, and as he becomes more expert the amount is increased until at the end of, say, his fourth year in the breaker, his daily wage may have reached ninety cents. This is the maximum for an especially industrious and skillful boy." The average was about seventy cents a day.

Although some apologists claimed that the work was no more dangerous than any other job in the mines, the immaturity and inattentiveness of the breaker boys, along with their "high spirits," often put them at great risk. One poignant contemporary account tells us that frequently "some unwary boy is suddenly caught in the web of the machinery; torn and mangled; perhaps swept down the chutes to sudden death. Then the breaker boys have a half-holiday to march behind their comrade to his small new grave on a quiet hill. Who can say that the living in these little processions are more fortunate than the dead?" Those who survived graduated to other jobs in the mines, eventually becoming coal miners who, years later, might return to the breakers.

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Mara Lou Hawse