Breaker Boys Growing Up In Coal Country, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1996, pp. 13-16

The young boys worked in the coal breaker, the tall gloomy structure where coal was broken and sorted.... The inside of a breaker was a large, noisy room. It had high walls and a flight of narrow steps that climbed past blackened wooden beams and grimy windows. Long iron chutes ran from the top of the breaker to the floor. The boys took their seats on pine boards lying astride the chutes. Because not everything that came out of the mines was coal--it was a mixture of coal, rock, slate, and other refuse--it was up to the breaker boys to pick out the refuse, or culm, as the coal flowed down the long iron chutes. As each full coal car emerged from the mine, it was pulled to the top of the breaker by a long steel cable. There, a man threw a lever, the car tipped, and the coal rushed out onto a shaking machine, which pushed the coal toward the long chutes that ran from the top of the breaker to the bottom. As the coal streamed down the chutes toward the boys, it spewed black clouds of coal dust, steam, and smoke, which settled over the boys like a blanket and turned their faces and clothing coal-black. To keep from inhaling the dust, the boys wore handkerchiefs over their mouths. Behind the handkerchiefs, their jaws worked on wads of tobacco that they chewed to keep their mouths moist. "Smoking was not allowed," said James Sullivan. "Chewing tobacco was supposed to prevent the breaker dust from going down your throat." The boys used their feet to stop the flow of coal. They picked out pieces of slate and rock from the chutes, then lifted their feet so that the coal continued to the next boy. The slate and rock were tossed into another chute, which emptied into cars that were dumped at the culm banks. The culm banks grew into large, coarse gray mountains that surrounded the colliery and the mine workers' homes. The clean coal continued on into railroad cars, ready for market. All around the boys, deafening machinery crushed and separated tons of coal into various sizes, ranging from rice to pea to stone to egg. When the breaker was running at full capacity, work began at seven in the morning and did not end until six or six-thirty at night. Since the boys weren't allowed to nail backrests to their seats, their backs ached from sitting in a hunched position all day. The bosses also forbade the boys to wear gloves, even in the coldest weather, because they impaired their sense of touch and finger movement. "If we were discovered wearing gloves," remembered one breaker boy, "the boss would strike our knuckles with a long stick he carried." As a result, for the first few weeks, the sulfur "muck" on the coal irritated the boys' skin and caused their fingers to swell, crack open, and bleed. This painful condition was called "red tips." After the boys had worked two or three weeks, their fingers hardened and there were no more red tips. In the meantime, however, mothers applied goose grease to their sons' fingers each night.

	Updated on Saturday, 01-Jul-2000 18:08:50 MDT