The boys in this photo from 1911 are just children. All of them are between eight and 12 years old — years you no doubt spent in elementary and middle school. For the boys in the picture, those years ...The boys in this photo from 1911 are just children. All of them are between eight and 12 years old — years you no doubt spent in elementary and middle school. For the boys in the picture, those years were spent as coal workers in a Pennsylvania mine. Their job was to separate impurities from coal by hand. For ten hours each day, six days a week, they would sit on wooden seats, perched over chutes and conveyor belts, picking impurities out of the coal. The use of boys to do this work began in the
