I still remember my grandfather would have to walk 4-5 miles to work at the paper mill, and on his way there, he would pick up pieces of coal along the tracks that fell off the cars and he would set it aside in piles. When his shift was done at the paper mill and he would walk back to home, he would pick up the small piles of coal he made earlier that morning to bring home to the family for heating the house and for heating the stove to cook on.

In 1970 I started work at Magma Copper in Superior Arizona. I was assigned to the mill and crusher section and most new hires were "pickers" for a couple of weeks. All sorts of garbage comes out of a copper mine as the miners use the ore chutes as a garbage dump. Wood, broken "jacks" (sledge hammers) and lots and lots of blasting caps. As a picker you had to pull out as much as you could before it hit the jaw crusher. There was another picker before the Symons crusher to get what the first guy missed. The Symons crushed the ore into pea gravel size. Occasionally the first guy missed a sledge hammer head and it was important for the second guy to get it. If not, a sledge hammer head being bigger than pea gravel size makes a hell of a racket in the second crusher. They said you could hear it in downtown Superior when it happened.

As a state worker from Philadelphia I first got to see some of these massive buildings in my travel for my job. As noted most of them are now inactive since coal useage has dropped off. I grew up with coal heat when I was younger and did notice the difference in coal quality that we used to heat our house. A good load of coal resulted in a nice fine white ash. Coal with slate or other impurities did not burn as well and resulted with ash with lumps of unburnt coal attached to whatever the impurity consigned of. It is nice to see someone put up the history of the hard work that went into processing coal for consumption.

Just imagine the noise. It must have been horribly loud. At a time when going deaf was just considered "getting used to" the noise.

My grandpa was a breaker boy and only those of us who grew up in NEPA regularly saw these old abandoned breakers and the culm banks that were never cleaned up.

I am a 67y coal mine engineer from India.enjoy all coal mine related video of all country..can not forget joy and sorrow of the profession left 7y ago.

I had two Grandfathers who were miners as young kids in North Eastern PA, one was a breaker boy the other tended to the mules down in the mines.....the working conditions and the way the mining company treated its workers was hellish and unbelievably unbearable..

I live in South Africa, just as much coal mining activities here, I worked at a mine on the Swaziland boarder for two years, my brother's both ten years, my dad the same place 28 years . All of us are artisans, I luckily moved to a papermill in the same area. The mines are treacherous places to work 👌

🚂 On a side note, many of the Pennsylvania coal mines have been repurposed to grow mushrooms that are rich in protein and provide jobs to the local community 🍄

As someone who fell down a research rabbit hole and hyperfixated on breaker boys at two in the morning four months ago, it is absolutely AMAZINF that there’s a whole documentary on it. There was very little information on the internet on coal mines unless it was about the strikes, and every new website had a repeat of old information. Stoked when a friend sent this to me.

For anybody interested, the National Park Service established the Blue Heron Mining exhibit near Stearns, Ky. The original coal processing plant was refurbished and ghost buildings built to show how the old mine camp used to be. Just look it up online and maybe make a visit someday.

Shout-out to Breaker Brewing Co. In Wilkes-Barre. Great beers, food, and history to be observed about Breaker Boys and coal in the tap room.

My uncle used to work as a miner. He was picking up wooden chocks from a moving conveyor when he had an accident. The chock stuck in the convayor as he picked it up and the forward force of the moving belt pushed the chock upward with my uncle's hand holding the other end. His fingers was crushed between the chock and the rails which were above the belt. He said there was so much force that the wood split and the whole machine jammed up and he was stuck there. He lost one finger and half of another.

We refer to these as tipples or preparation plants in the Bituminous coal regions in West Virginia and Kentucky. I work at a coal mill, we grind coal into powder in a similar consistency to talc or baby powder, and sell it to some big name tire and rubber companies, it’s absolutely filthy work, but it pays well and like the breaker in the video we suffered a fire that crippled the plant for almost a year. People don’t realize how hot coal can actually burn when it gets set off.

I used to explore the St. Nicholas, the Huber, the Locust Summit, and other breakers here in PA. All gone now. Watched some of the disassembly of the Huber. Very sad to see. I'd call them pretty hazardous if you're not paying attention, or just aren't too bright. Sometimes saw kids in them..when parents are that careless, property owners and lawyers get nervous- probably part of the reason they're gone. All that I entered were steel structures, not wood. Although plenty of coal around on all floors to burn. Slowly. I really miss them..tried to bring friends, all were sort of amazed and fascinated, even if it at first sounded like a weird way to spend an afternoon. Something you'd never forget. An amusement park is a contrived waste of time compared to things like this! It seemed more correct to think of it as a large machine, covered to resemble a building from the outside, rather than a building containing machinery.

Growing up I knew an old man in his 90s who was a breaker boy when he was young.

I was at NRG coal plant outside of Rosenberg Texas several times, and the process is still much the same with better technology. It's pretty cool actually!

For those who are wondering why these buildings are uniquely Pennsylvanian, according to geologists, Pennsylvania contains approximately 90% - 96% of the *entire world's* supply of anthracite coal.

The way they processed coal on conveyor belts, reminds me of the conveyor belts in the fruit packing houses. My two aunt's, Elsie and Louise worked in the packing houses up in Sacramento while in their teens. I use to work in a industrial laundry in my early 20's, and they had conveyor belts in one laundry I worked at, it was called Hospital Linen Supply, and was on North Broadway here in Fresno, but it got torn down years ago when they put in the 41 freeway.

Reminds me, my grandfather told me about his time at a coal plant. The train would come and mechanically be triggered to dump thousands of pounds worth. He remembered once a hitchiker mistakenly was riding along, and they frankly had no way to stop him from being crushed immediately by all the coal let alone the grinders past that

Got a ton of Anthracite coal today at superior coal processing and they seemed pretty happy.

When I was younger we lived by a cold breaker in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania what a big noisy building that thing was and like all the other ones they tore it down and funny as hell they put up a old age home there LOL great video brings back a lot of memories👍👍🇺🇲🇺🇲✌️

My dad went inside the coal mine when he was 12years old helping his dad load coal by hand

Breakers were unique to anthracite country. In bituminous coal country, "Preparation Plants" are a lot smaller and perform many of the same functions to this day. Bituminous or soft coal is a lot easier to grind up into saleable sizes.

I grew up in Wilkes-Barre, PA (just south of Old Forge). My grandmother's house was located near one of these old breaker buildings in Ashley. We used to sneak over the old slate left over coal mining mountains and into the building. Was abandoned for decades and it was a very scary place for a little kid. This was back in the late 70s. Coal mining was dead by that time in NEPA due to the mines flooding but it was still very much part of the cultural zeitgeist back then. All our grandparents worked in the mines etc. Video takes me back!

I live in Madrid NM, an old ghost/coal mining town that at one time had a breaker the size of the one featured here. There were both anthracite and bituminous, layered on top of each other. Many stories of mine explosions and accidents, with some of the dead buried in the old graveyard on the other side of town.

Awesome video I live maybe a 300 yards from where the Sibley Breaker used to be again great video.

I live in North East PA and this is some great history from our area! Thank you!

Thank you so much for all the wonderful videos you offer. I have learned so much.

Hello from ND. Our daughter and son in law moved to NH in 2011 so every June my wife and I travel through eastern PA. We have taken our time share week in several resorts in that area. We then travel around on day trips seeing tourist things. Took a canal boat ride, took an electric train ride into an old coal mine, went to that old coal mining town where The Molly Maquires movie was filmed in 1969. Bought the DVD at the gift shop and a book about that river that flooded the mine in april of 61. Went to the steam locomotive museum in Scranton also to Jim Thorpe. Every state in our great country has unique history. I went down 100 ft into an old gold mine in Colorado, I understand that there is a deeper tourist iron ore mine in Minnesota that one can go down into, thats on my bucket list. Great lakes bulk carriers are in several towns on our Great Lakes coast line, Cleveland, Ohio, Sault Ste Marie, MI, Duluth, Minnesota, ect. Ive even been on a WW2 submarine in Manitowoc WI. Also the Nautilus in Groton. So get out there and travel and see all these great attractions.

In west Virginia these things were everywhere growing up. Most have fallen down or are covered in vegetation now.

I used to paint coal breakers in HS in Schuylkill County. Was still fully operated by Readin Anthracite. Never actually worked on the coal but painting it was more than enough.

I don't know if this is beyond the scope of this channel, but imo an interesting subject is the mining of lapis lazuli over the past 7,000 years. In Afghanistan the Sar-e-Sang deposit has been actively mined for all that time. I find it simply astonishing. (plus lapis lazuli is one of the most gorgeous stones the Earth produces) I know this channel mainly focuses on more modern US history, but maybe something like that would be nice to do. Just a random thought I had relating to mining while watching this video anyways. It's history afterall :D edit: typos

Hats off too all coal miners.🗽👍😊

"Child labour laws are destroying our country" -Ron Swanson

the image @6;45 in the video ...is of the ST. Nickolas brake between Shenandoah and Mahanoy City ...it was THEE last one to stand ...there is a video of it on youtube of it being blown up

Great presentation thanks xxx

excellent vid, great info very precise !

Hello from Wilkes-Barre , I'm the first generation that didn't have to go down .

I was thinking these would be unique to Pennsylvania Anthracite country. Anthracite is an extremely hard coal, and needs to be crushed before it could be used in MGP gas generators or power plant boilers. It was the preferred fuel for Manufactured Gas Plants because of its few impurities. The use of Bituminous coal in MGPs would create a lot of waste and toxic byproducts.

Great video I grew up in the coal regions, grandfather was a miner …Scranton area.

Fascinating. Would love to see a video on the Huber Breaker! Remember driving by it as a kid. Something about "blue coal." So strange! Always wondered what it looked like inside.

When I read "stay tuned for the answer" I leave immediately.

Unless I get to be the rich guy with a cigar who likes to twirl his mustache as the money comes pouring in, I want nothing whatsoever to do with mining. The people who willingly do that work are made of sterner stuff than I am.

Just thinking of a ten year old boy working in all that coal dust. A lot of those kids would take up smoking at an early age and then were sent to work in the coal mines when they were old enough. All that coal dust in their lungs. If an accident didn't get them, I bet a lot never made it to 40. I wonder if they ever learned to read.

It’s sad to realise how little a human life was worth back in the day and how children were forced to work due to hard times.

theres a huge cole braker musem in Estonia, i would reccomend people visiting it for more info.

in Alberta Canada there is still one privately owned coal mine that still use this process to mine and sell coal all across western Canada. I use about 2000 lbs to heat my garage.

One of the best channels on KZfaq.

Good show! Now do one on the Marvine breakers in No. Scranton. PA., please.

Lived in eastern pa my whole life and didn’t realize these were unique to pa until my late 20s.

I live near Brownsville n there are remains of one of these still standing near by lol always wondered what it was used for. Fascinating

It's always nice to learn something new, but this was a "borderline" grim one...

Interesting video

Coal. Coal. Coal. Coal. I think I heard the word coal so often it stopped making sense. Great video.

One factor presumably was the inconsistent grades of coal found in Pennsylvania, whereas coal-mines here in Australia have usually produced reasonably good quality coal, especially coking-coal, although Central Victoria yielded abundant quantities of the lower-grade brown coal up until the closing of the large open-cut mine and the power-station it supplied!

Got similar things all over the UK

Pretty amazing stuff here

I live next to the Wyoming valley, up until 2008? Iirc, there was a huge breaker along I-81/309, I remember when they knocked it down.

Hello do you have more I could read about bodies being left in the machine until the end of the day?

Very INTERESTING

I love your videos. You are a Jersey guy right?

We take so much for granted in this modern world what a bunch of madness our ancestors lived through

The most valuable coal in British mines was large coal. This was used in the steam engines that powered trains, ships and factories. Miners were only paid for the amount of large coal they dug out. Small coal, despite being sold by the mine owners, was not paid for.

Great video, however, the last two breakers are no longer there.

I thought you were gonna say “5,260,855 tons of coal *per day* “ for a second 👀😂🫠.. Anyways, nothing quite like beating off a bunch of coal with likely a pickaxe, surrounded by coal dust with sparks flying at your feet. *Good thing coal is **_INflammable_** I guess!!!* *Edit before being “corrected” and possible berated lol:* _Yes, I do know that coal is not actually inflammable, but rather flammable due to its it’s ignition properties. Just randomly thought about an old ass episode of the Simpsons with a similar joke lol_

I worked for a coal company that had a mine in KY that used slate pickers. Similar to ‘breakers’, these folks were not underground qualified and often if an employee couldn’t make it to work he’d send his wife to work his shift. This was in the 80’s.

Im from one of the most coal dependent areas of Britain (Lancashire) where we have over 500 years of coal mining history. Instead of coal breakers we employed Pit Brow Lasses (women, usually wives and daughters of the colliers) to sort the coal at the pithead using pickaxes and sorting the pieces by hand. They were a Lancastrian breed, they had them in the Welsh mines too but Lancashire was known in particular for their employ, and they were a curiosity for outsiders at the time, as they were probably some of the only women employed anywhere to wear trousers. This was for the sake of practicality (they worked outside in the cold all year round and the job was needless to say very dirty)They would wear them beneath their dresses along with a jacket and a shawl or headscarf. They terrified the higher classes, needless to say.

That breaker processed some 5 million tonnes of coal over many decades. I've worked at a mine that sends out sometimes 12 trains a day, at 110 tons per car, and 150 cars per train. roughly.

Interesting and top quality. Thank you for your time and work.

My grandfather worked at the St Nicholas coal breaker in Shenandoah Pennsylvania.

It's insane what sacrifices were made to build the modern world

I never heard of these extinct factories. They are magnificent in their complexity and size.

Used to work in one of these back in the 60s in Teufort county Arizona. As if the job itself wasnt dangerous enough, We used to get harassed by these groups of bumbling idiots shooting eachother for about 15 years straight.

Fascinating, especially the photo of the young coal pickers at 4:44. I had no idea that this was such a common practice. How is it done today?

I’m a retired prep plant operator it is still brute work too this day.

My great grandfather was a child coal breaker in Cornwall in england and my grandfather worked in a coal mine here in Australia and my dad worked in one also (same mine as his father) but he was a teenager that had to work on mining machines but he was only there for a year before moving to another state

The thing that most people don't understand is that, for all those families who sent their children off to work, it was either do so or starve. I think it would be foolish to judge the 19th century by today's standards.

You should do one on the one in Ashley PA called blue coal were they painted it blue

Last year, I read a historical novel, "Coal River" by Ellen Marie Wiseman. It tells a painful tail of a Pennsylvania company town whose primary industry is coal mining and the plight of not only the woman protagonist, but the breaker boys. It is worth the read if you found this video interesting.

Oh yes, this definitely needs to be an industry we need to bring back to its full potential. Sounds promising

So, how is coal processes and sorted now? While coal is used less in the USA, coal is still used in many countries and many of the USA mines, including some in PA and WV are exporting coal to other places where the people are happy to get it.

I got to see a new Coal Processing & Handling Facility that was recently commissioned in Australia. It does the breaking, crushing, sorting, cleaning, and final transfer of coal to railcars in a siding loop to be sent to the ports or industrial areas. Everything is fully automated. You only need a handful of workers to monitor the process in a room full of computer monitors & CCTV screens. And a team of engineers and technicians to do maintenence & fix any issues. Certainly no breaker boys, although we get heaps of interest from high school grads looking to get an upper 5-figure job scrubbing mancamp toilets or as kitchen-hands. The facility does around 10 to 12 million tons of coal per year... twice the total amount done by this breaker in its ~50 year history.

Child labor laws. They're kind of a big deal and super necessary.

I'm only just turned 40 but watching this makes me feel really old coz when I was a kid we still had coal fires, coal bunkers, coal men, coal mines! My kids probably don't know what coal is.

I think I saw one while passing though Youngtown Ohio... I know its close but still technically not Pennsylvania.

they look so cool i wish it were still there

This was my second work place ( back in the day).

All these factories that just sit rotting away need to be claimed as historical sites

My g-father worked in the office of a anthracite coal company, he was in a film showing the coal being processed in the 1930s, explaining some of the sizes as Barley, Rice, Buckwheat, Pea and Egg, the trade mark was Blue Coal and they sprayed the coal in the hopper cars with blue dye as the hopper car was pulled out of the colliery.

There is no coal breakers from the 1800's left standing in in PA the last one standing was tore down in March of 2018

The incidence of lung-cancer must have been huge

They are not Coal Break, THEY WERE Called Screens too get the size of Coal Lumps, Look up Coal size price per ton

There is a rollercoaster ride in Hershey park Pennsylvania called the coal cracker I now know why

The words "Pennsylvania" and "Coal" in the same sentence needs to be punctuated with the word "Greed" and "Irresponsible" - they pretty much cornered the market on it.

Interesting

They know the amount of coal processed to seven significant digits?

Didn't know about this part of history. Makes Red Dead Annesburg seem cooler.

what is wooder?

My great grandfather lost his index finger working as a breaker boy in nepa