This #WorkerWednesday, we’re sharing this 1903 photograph of a group of squib workers at an anthracite coal mill in western Pennsylvania. Squibs were explosive devices used by miners to separate coal from rock. Workers like these women and girls performed the often dangerous work of making squibs by filling parchment tubes with explosive black powder and sealing the ends of the finished squib. The photographer was Frank E. Schoonover, whose many illustration jobs included “Children of the Coal Shadows,” an expose of child labor in the coal counties of Pennsylvania, which was published in McClure’s Magazine in February 1903. The following October, Schoonover traveled to Scranton and lived with a coal mining family for two weeks while photographing and sketching the mines and surrounding areas.
