Child Labor

From sardine canneries (in Eastport, Maine where children did dangerous work) to shrimp and oyster canneries (in places like Biloxi, Mississippi and Bluffton, South Carolina where children and African-Americans worked side-by-side), child labor was a pervasive part of American life during the first decades of the 20th century.

• Five-year-old Preston and 6-year-old Elsie Shaw (note her missing left arm) worked (in 1911) as cartoners while other youngsters served as cutters or fish cleaners for Maine's Seacoast Canning Company.



• Mildred Kron (aged three in 1911) and her sister Gertrude (aged five) were only two of many children who shucked oysters or picked shrimp for Biloxi's canning companies. Most started work at 7:00 a.m. and weren't tall enough to do their jobs.



• Every member of the Peter Elvis family, except the baby, worked for the Barataria Canning Company in Biloxi, Mississippi. Pictured at their New Orleans home in 1911, Jo (the 7-year-old boy) worked Saturdays and Alma (a 3-year-old girl) was "learnin' the trade," according to her mother.



• Cora Croslen, and her 3-year-old daughter Alma, both worked at Barataria. They were originally from Baltimore, Maryland.



• The "shucking boss" supervised as women and children shucked oysters in Dunbar, Louisiana.



• Maude Daly (age 5) and her sister Grace (age 3) each picked about one pot of shrimp a day (in 1911) for the Peerless Oyster Company in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi.

Today, men who work in America's coal mines do some of the hardest work in the country. During the first decades of the 20th century, before modern equipment made a hard job a bit easier, young boys toiled underground in those same Appalachian mines.