Chapter 4

YOUNG BOY ’S DEATH CHANGED THE LAW

In the last half of the nineteenth century, the Bay City business moguls had accumulated immense wealth in lumber, shipping, shipbuilding, mining, heavy industry and manufacturing, and they had accomplished nearly all of it with the help of child labor. In those industries, children were employed in often dangerous situations at low wages.

One study of wages showed sawmills employed boys on various jobs at only half the pay of a man doing the same work, or about $0.75 a day. Girls employed in domestic jobs might only earn $1.50 a week.

Child labor was a fact of life for most of the nineteenth century, and many children were maimed or killed in the process; however, nothing much was done to change the practice. Coal mining was one industry where children as young as ten were employed, often as breaker boys. In this role, they sorted impurities from the coal as it flowed down a conveyor line into bins, an occupation quite dangerous to their hands and with the added danger of being supervised by armed men ready to beat them if they slacked off. Others performed various tasks in the mines that also were dangerous.

Boys working in lumber mills lost fingers and hands, either through cuts from saws or from having them crushed by logs or when stacks of cut lumber shifted. Boys working at the coal mines in southwestern Bay County often became ill from toxic fumes or suffered injuries in accidents.

Even when child labor regulations were imposed, prohibiting the hiring of youths under sixteen, many employers circumvented the laws. Other industries depended on workers between sixteen and eighteen, whom they also paid half wages.

Breaker boys worked long hours inhaling coal dust as they sorted slabs in bins with supervisors standing nearby ready to beat them if they appeared to slack off on their tasks. Child labor was common throughout the local industrial history. Library of Congress.

On December 18, 1894, four teenage boys and another worker were killed in an explosion at the Russell Brothers & Co. planing mill and box factory in West Bay City. According to reports, a boiler in the building on Kelton Street in the Salzburg district of the city exploded at about 9:30 a.m.

The dead included George Pfund, seventeen; Albert Huebenbecker, eighteen; John Calcutt, twenty-four; Albert Rahn, sixteen; and John Braun, eighteen. Injured were Charles Doege, twenty-two; Roe Hudson, sixteen; and Fred Wildanger, seventeen.

Investigators said the four were in a fire room near the boiler eating a lunch, as was their custom on their morning break, when the boiler exploded. The blast mangled all four of them to the point of making them almost unrecognizable. Several of the boys’ mothers who lived in the Salzburg area and felt the explosion rushed to the mill, but some of the workers kept them from going into the makeshift morgue set up in one of the small buildings.

The three who were injured were in another room nearby and were hurt as the blast hurled bricks, boards and metal in their direction.

While Bay City’s new city hall, shown here, was under construction in 1894, an eleven-yearold worker was killed when he fell seventy-five feet from a ceiling area inside the structure. Tim Younkman.

A committee selected to examine the circumstances of the explosion said the boiler failed because of its being “overtaxed” with an extreme pressure load to run the mill machinery. The public expressed concern but not outrage at the death of the youths.

Something that did outrage the public came that same year on October 23, 1894, when a young worker not yet twelve years old was helping in the construction of the new city hall on Washington Avenue. He and another youth were working seventy-five feet above the floor at the underside of the roof, securing by wire the roofing tiles being laid on the outside.

Investigators said they were told it was a standard procedure for the boys to work in such a precarious position, but it also was the way the roofing material was commonly installed. Robbie Waldo, who was to turn twelve on November 1, was attaching the wires from the tiles to nails he was driving into the wood frame. At about 8:30 a.m., Robbie was reaching to attach the wire and lost his balance. He fell from his scaffold, bouncing off several beams, before free-falling onto the cement floor seventy-five feet from the ceiling.

A worker reported hearing him gasp for breath as he died. Robbie still clutched his work hammer in one hand.

A police wagon was summoned, and the remains of the lad were taken to his home at 218 Jefferson Street, only a few blocks to the east. His mother was told ahead of time that he was being brought home, but she was so distraught as to be inconsolable.

A coroner’s inquest confirmed that the death was an accident rather than some defect of equipment, although nothing was said of the age of the deceased or of the lack of any safety equipment.

The next day, Bay City alderman Edward Kroencke introduced a resolution to the common council that demanded a restriction on child labor. In his resolution, Kroencke noted that Robbie Waldo, who also sometimes used the name of his stepfather, Rifenburg, was a lad of eleven. The resolution required that any contract the city entered for public works be with employers that did not have any employees under the age of sixteen.

The resolution was accepted unanimously and went into effect immediately, being the first such ordinance in the state of Michigan. Similar resolutions and laws in other states were enacted late in the nineteenth century and around Michigan by the end of the decade, but most were ignored by contractors.

It would be another eighty-four years before the State of Michigan enacted the Youth Employment Standards Act, banning underage workers from hazardous sites. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Labor, two million children younger than fifteen years of age were employed in 1910.

The City of West Bay City actually passed an ordinance requiring employers not to have anyone employed under the age of fourteen, and that law was used to charge William Goldie Jr., owner of Goldie Manufacturing Co., with having an underage employee.

The charge stemmed from an incident on June 5, 1903, in which employee Edgar Peterson lost part of his hand when it was crushed in machinery. Two doctors were called, and they operated on the mangled right hand, severing two fingers and the thumb all the way back to the wrist.

Justice of the Peace Frederick Neumann arraigned Goldie on a charge of employing thirteen-year-old Peterson in violation of the ordinance.