Turkey Knob Mine, MacDonald, West Virginia, USA
(Lewis Hine / Library of Congress)
Around 2 million children below the age of fifteen were working in industry in 1910. The benefits to employers were apparent: the ability of children to squeeze into small spaces, to manipulate fine tools, and to earn lower wages. For large families, those wages could mean the difference between getting by and destitution. Equally, the work undertaken was often beyond the capacity of a child. Accident rates were high, and compensation was negligible.
Teacher Lewis Hine acted as a photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, set up in 1904 to end child labor. Hine, with other photographers, was paid by the Committee to record the hardships experienced by children across America in mills, mines, yards and factories. Much of Hine’s work was carried out without the knowledge of the children’s employers.
The mining town of Turkey Knob, MacDonald, had grown up fifteen years before – its name derived from the wild turkeys hunted in the area. This boy’s work was to wait in the darkness of the mine, and to open and close a door between two mining chambers. According to Hine’s notes: ‘Boy had to stoop on account of low roof, photo taken more than a mile inside the mine.’
‘In the bituminous mines of West Virginia, boys of nine or ten are frequently employed. Think of what it means to be a trap boy at ten years of age. It means to sit alone in a dark mine passage hour after hour, with no human soul near; to see no living creature except the mules as they pass with their loads, or a rat or two seeking to share one’s meal; to stand in water or mud that covers the ankles, chilled to the marrow by the cold draughts that rush in when you open the trap door for the mules to pass through; to work for fourteen hours – waiting – opening and shutting a door – then waiting again for sixty cents; to reach the surface when all is wrapped in the mantle of night, and to fall to the earth exhausted and have to be carried away to the nearest “shack” to be revived before it is possible to walk to the farther shack called “home”.’
John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children, 1906
