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much more than matchstick houses, with two rooms, a kitchen area down and a garret upstairs where children slept. These cabins did little to keep out the rain and cold. The unskilled workers slept in worse conditions, in shacks sometimes filled with so many people that they had to sleep in shifts. And they paid a fairly high rent for this housing, which was taken out of their pay.
    Although this book is about the Delaware Division Canal, it is important to touch on the story of the miners when talking about the transportation of the coal after it was dug out of the mountains. The narratives are intertwined, for without the first there would not have been the need for the latter; and possibly, without the brave men and little boys who descended sometimes more than a thousand feet deep into the ground with picks and shovels, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. It was best said by a coal miner in 1874:
    [M] illions of firesides of rich and poor must be supplied by our labor…the magnificent steamer that ploughs the ocean, rivers and lakes, the locomotive, whose shrill whistle echoes and re-echoes from Maine to California, the rolling mills, the cotton mills, the flour mills, the world’s entire machinery, is moved, propelled by our labor . 25
    The youngest of the miners were the “breaker boys”—children who worked in the building where coal was broken and sorted. They were as young as five years old, and according to Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s book, Growing Up in Coal County , their hours at work were possibly the hardest and definitely the most heartbreaking.
    The breaker boys sat in chutes below where cars filled with coal were tipped and the contents poured into a machine that pushed the coal down toward the boys. As the coal tumbled down the chutes, a blanket of black coal dust covered the children. They wore handkerchiefs over their mouths to try to keep from breathing in the dust and chewed tobacco to keep their mouths moist. (Again, these are children as young as five years old!) They worked from seven in the morning until six or six-thirty at night with very few breaks, separating slate and rock from the coal, hunched over their work all day without backrests to give them support. They weren’t permitted to wear gloves because it interfered with their sense of touch and their fingers swelled and bled until they hardened with calluses.
    The breaker bosses oversaw the little boys’ work, usually with a club or broomstick against their backs if they slacked off or missed pieces of slate or rock. Sometimes, if the children resisted and protested because of the abuse, they were literally whipped back to work.
    The work at the breakers was no less dangerous than the work going on below ground. Children’s fingers were amputated in the conveyors; others fell down the chutes and became buried in coal or fell into the crusher where the coal was being ground along with their little bodies.
    In John Spargo’s exposé, The Bitter Cry of the Children , he describes the atmosphere of the breaker:
    Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears…I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed . 26

    Boys as young as five years old worked in the breakers, one of the most hazardous jobs in the mines. Courtesy of Robin G. Lightly, Mineral Resources program manager, Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, PA Department of Environmental Protection .
    As they got older they were “promoted” to work inside the mines, in the damp, cold, dark and rat-infested underground chambers. But that was okay—they longed for the day. Bartoletti quotes a miner named Joseph Miliauskas, who reflected on what it was like to work as a