50+ Heart-Wrenching Photos Depicting How Children Were Exploited For Profit In The 1900s

The 1900 U.S. Census counted more than 1.75 million children between the ages of ten and fifteen working for wages across the country. They labored in cotton mills, coal mines, canneries, glass factories, and on city streets — often for pennies a day. The industrial revolution had opened up factories and expanded agriculture at a scale that made cheap labor enormously profitable. Children were easy to exploit. They were small, obedient, and desperate. Many came from families with no other options.

Lewis Wickes Hine was a sociologist and photographer who made it his mission to expose this system. Beginning in 1908, he traveled across the United States documenting child workers on behalf of the National Child Labor Committee. Factory owners threatened him. He was refused entry, followed, and intimidated. He went in anyway — sometimes posing as a fire inspector or Bible salesman to get inside. He took thousands of photographs, each one carefully annotated with the child’s name, age, location, and job. His notes were precise and damning.

Oyster shucking was among the most grueling jobs assigned to young children in the South. The work began before dawn and continued all day in cold, wet conditions. Children used sharp tools to pry open shells, cutting their hands repeatedly in the process. Seven-year-old Rosie in Bluffton, South Carolina, was in her second year of doing exactly this. She was illiterate and worked full days at the Varn & Plat Canning Company.

The physical dangers were constant and severe. Giles Edmund Newsome was working in a spinning mill when a piece of machinery fell on his foot. The impact caused him to fall forward into an unprotected gear mechanism, which crushed and tore off two of his fingers. He was a child. Injuries like his were not rare — they were routine. Machines had no safety guards, and children were expected to work around them anyway.

On the streets of larger cities, young children sold newspapers from early morning into the night. These “newsies” operated independently, buying papers in bulk and trying to sell enough to turn a profit. Many were so young they couldn’t count change. Seven-year-old Ferris in Mobile, Alabama, was one of them. Hine noted that he did not know enough to make change for an investigator.

Cotton fields across the South and Midwest relied heavily on child labor during harvest season. Eleven-year-old Callie Campbell picked between 75 and 125 pounds of cotton every day in Pottawattamie County, Oklahoma. When her sack was full, she carried 50 pounds of it herself. When Hine asked if she liked the work, she said simply: “No, I don’t like it very much.”

Entire families were often pulled into the labor system together. In Browns Mills, New Jersey, the Arnao family worked as a unit. The youngest child, Jo, was three years old. The family was documented in late May 1910, before the school year had even ended — meaning the children were missing school to work alongside their parents in the fields.

Coal mines were among the deadliest workplaces for child laborers. Boys worked as trappers — sitting alone in dark tunnels for up to ten hours, opening and closing ventilation doors as coal cars passed. Others drove mule-drawn cars through the mine shafts. Frank, photographed in Monongah, West Virginia, had both legs severed by a motor car in the mine. He was fourteen years and ten months old when it happened.

Tipple boys worked at the surface of coal mines, sorting and separating coal from slate and rock as it came up from below. The work coated their hands, faces, and lungs with coal dust. Many of these boys worked in stooped positions for hours at a time, damaging their posture and their health permanently. Some were barely old enough for school.

Vance was fifteen years old and had already spent several years working as a trapper boy in a West Virginia coal mine. His entire job consisted of opening and closing a ventilation door as coal cars moved through the tunnel. He earned 75 cents for a ten-hour shift. He sat alone in the dark for most of the day with no light, no company, and no way out.

In textile mills across the South, children were assigned tasks specifically because of their small size. Boys too short to reach the upper sections of spinning frames climbed the machinery itself to mend broken threads and replace empty bobbins. This put them in direct contact with moving parts that could catch fingers, hands, or clothing in an instant.

A ten-year-old spinner at Rhodes Manufacturing Company in Lincolnton, North Carolina, had already been working in the mill for over a year when Hine photographed her. The image captures her glancing briefly toward a window — a small moment of light in an otherwise airless environment. She had been working there since she was nine.

Breaker boys spent their days hunched over chutes of coal, picking out pieces of slate by hand as the coal moved past. The dust was constant. The noise was deafening. Their backs bent and stayed bent. Hine photographed the noon break at the Ewen Breaker in South Pittston, Pennsylvania, where rows of boys sat covered in black dust, resting during their only break of the day.

Coal mines employed children in a variety of roles beyond trapping and driving. “Greasers” were boys responsible for lubricating the axles and wheels of the mine cars to keep them running. The work kept them close to moving equipment deep underground. At the Bessie Mine in Alabama, Hine documented one such boy doing exactly this job.

Glass factories operated around the clock and employed boys on both day and night shifts. The heat inside a glass works was extreme. Boys carried molten glass in iron molds, fed furnaces, and worked around equipment that burned at temperatures no child should have been near. Hine photographed a lunch break at the Economy Glass Works in Morgantown, West Virginia, noting that there were “plenty more like this, inside.”

Work for children didn’t stop when the sun went down. Boys set pins in bowling alleys well past midnight. Hine photographed workers at the Arcade Bowling Alley in Trenton, New Jersey, late at night. The image shows boys still on duty after hours, bent over the lanes resetting pins by hand — a job that kept them crouched and moving for hours in a loud, poorly lit basement.

Twelve-year-old Antoinette Siminger was photographed at 10 p.m. in Cincinnati, Ohio, still selling baskets at the Sixth Street Market. She had been working since morning. She called out her price to anyone who passed — “basket! Five cents each!” — as the market thinned out around her late at night.

Not every image Hine captured showed exploitation in its most brutal form. In Boston, he documented girls attending a free evening school to learn dressmaking. These were working girls — many of them spent their days in factories or doing piecework — who came to school at night. Their presence in that classroom after a full day of labor reflects both the limits and the determination that defined so many young lives of the era.

Agricultural labor pulled children from Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and elsewhere into New Jersey’s cranberry bogs every summer. Eight-year-old Jennie Camillo from West Manayunk, Pennsylvania, was one of them. She spent her summer picking cranberries in Pemberton, New Jersey — kneeling in the dirt for hours, filling buckets in exchange for a few cents.

Seven-year-old Fannie, standing 48 inches tall, worked alongside her sister at Elk Mills in Fayetteville, Tennessee. Children like Fannie were often brought to the mill because an older sibling already worked there. Supervisors accepted the arrangement. The mills wanted the labor, and families needed whatever they could earn.

The canning factories of South Carolina employed workers of all races and nearly all ages. Hine’s notes from Bluffton recorded a seven-year-old girl who shucked three pots of oysters a day alongside her six-year-old brother. The factory boss told Hine directly: “We keep only enough whites so we can control the negroes and keep them agoing.” The exploitation was layered — racial control used as a management tool over an already deeply exploited workforce.

Hosiery mills assigned children to repetitive, fast-moving jobs like looping and reeling, tasks that required quick hands but no particular strength. They were ideal for small children. Two tiny workers photographed at Loudon Hosiery Mills in Tennessee show just how young the mill workforce actually was — children whose entire work day was spent feeding thread through machines in a building full of noise and lint.

At the Peerless Oyster Company in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Hine documented Maud Daly, age five, and her sibling Grade Daly, age three. Both children picked shrimp. Grade was three years old. Each picked roughly one pot of shrimp per day. No protective equipment. No age restrictions. Just small hands working at a cold, wet table from the earliest hours of the morning.

Not all child labor happened in factories. Piecework done inside tenement apartments was common in cities like New York. A widow and her young son were photographed rolling cigarettes in a dirty New York tenement. This kind of home-based work was especially hard to regulate. There were no inspectors, no oversight, and no records. Entire families worked through the night to fill their quotas.

In San Antonio, Texas, Hine found two newsboys named Sonny and Pete. One of them was six years old. They had started selling papers at six in the morning. The street trade gave children no base wage — they earned only what they could sell, which meant working longer hours to survive. Younger children who couldn’t count change or navigate traffic were especially vulnerable.

Children sold produce, newspapers, flowers, and small goods across every major American city. In Boston, young fruit peddlers worked the market stalls and street corners. Hine documented these children for an exhibit in 1915, by which time he had already spent seven years building a visual record of exactly how widespread child labor had become in the United States.

Six-year-old Bertha was already at work by 4 a.m. at the Maggiano Canning Company in Port Royal, South Carolina. She was one of several young shuckers on the early shift. The canning industry along the Southeast coast ran on child labor, starting the workday before sunrise to process the overnight shellfish catch. Children as young as three and four were present in these facilities.

A young spinner at Whitnel Cotton Manufacturing in North Carolina stood 51 inches tall and had been working in the mill for a year, including some night shifts. She operated four sides of a spinning frame and earned 48 cents a day. When Hine asked her age, she hesitated and said she didn’t remember. Then, quietly, she told him: “I’m not old enough to work, but I do just the same.”

Glass factories ran night shifts that were just as dangerous as the day shifts — and sometimes more so. Two boys photographed at the More-Jonas Glass Company in Bridgeton, New Jersey, were working the night shift when Hine captured their image. The heat of the furnaces, the weight of the molds, and the hours involved made glasswork particularly brutal for young workers.

Messenger boys for telegraph companies worked routes that frequently took them through red-light districts. A boy employed by the MacKay Telegraph Company in Waco, Texas, told Hine he was fifteen years old. Hine’s notation records him as “exposed to red light dangers” — a documented concern in reports about messenger work, which took boys into brothels, saloons, and gambling houses as part of their regular routes.

Twelve-year-old Louis Birch had just started selling newspapers in Wilmington, Delaware. His father was dead. On his best day so far, he had made ten cents. Hine noted that no one forced Louis to sell papers — he started on his own to help support his mother. His story was common. Poverty turned children into earners before they had any real choice in the matter.

Three brothers in San Antonio started selling papers at 6 a.m. and continued until 9 or 10 at night, nearly every day of the week. Hine found them still working after 10 p.m. One of the brothers, Boyce, explained why: “We don’t go to school; got to sell papers. Father is sick.” The family’s survival depended on what those boys could earn on the street each day.

Six-year-old Elsie Shaw worked as a cartoner in Eastport, Maine during the summer. Her father told Hine he also had her perform a singing act in vaudeville during the winter. He then asked Hine to photograph her, noting that she was “old enough now to go through the audience and sell her own photos.” Her father treated her as a commercial product — a means of generating income in every season.

Furniture factories in Indianapolis employed boys on the production floor alongside adult workers. At noon, the children took their break the same as everyone else — sitting among sawdust and machinery. Hine documented the scene in August 1908, one of dozens of industrial settings he visited that year as he built his photographic record for the National Child Labor Committee.

Doffers were children assigned to remove full bobbins from spinning frames and replace them with empty ones. The job required moving quickly between dozens of spinning machines, reaching into the mechanisms while they were running. Young doffers at Mollohan Mills in Newberry, South Carolina, were photographed on December 3, 1908. Sara Hine served as witness to the documentation.

At Newberry Mills in South Carolina, the noon hour showed every worker still at their post. The caption on Hine’s photograph states plainly: “All are working here.” No real break. The machines kept running, and children kept tending them. The boy Willie at the Quidwick Company mill in Anthony, Rhode Island, was photographed taking his noon rest inside an empty doffer-box — a wooden container barely large enough to lie in.

In Alexandria, Virginia, Hine documented Black and white child workers laboring side by side in the glass factories. In much of the South, workplaces were rigidly segregated. The glass factories were an exception, not out of any commitment to equality, but because the work was dangerous enough and the pay low enough that factory owners took whoever they could get.

Eleven-year-old Lillian Dambrinio picked shrimp at the Peerless Oyster Company in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Hine noted that she was American-born and lived in the area — not a migrant worker. She told him the picking made her hands sore. The repetitive motion of pulling shrimp shells apart by hand for hours caused cuts and inflammation that didn’t heal between shifts.

Street vending in Indianapolis put very young children in daily contact with traffic, strangers, and long hours of standing. Hine and his colleague E. N. Clopper documented multiple child vendors in the city in August 1908 — fruit sellers at the market, newsboys on the corners. Clopper’s note on one particularly young newsboy read simply: “rather young.”

A messenger boy working for the ADT company was photographed in Indianapolis at 10 p.m. — still on duty, still running deliveries. Messenger work had no set end time. Boys carried telegrams, parcels, and other items across the city at all hours. The late-night routes were the most dangerous, taking children through neighborhoods and establishments that offered serious risks to any unaccompanied minor.

Migrant workers lived in temporary shack settlements near the fields and bogs they worked. At Florence Colony in Browns Mills, New Jersey, Hine photographed children and families in front of their housing during the noon break. It was the fourth week of the school year. The families expected to stay two more weeks, meaning the children would miss another two weeks of school — at minimum — that fall.

Ten-year-old Tenjeta Calone from Philadelphia had been picking cranberries in Browns Mills, New Jersey, for four years — meaning she started at age six. Children from urban areas were regularly brought to rural New Jersey each harvest season. At Merrimac Mills in Huntsville, Alabama, a group of boys was photographed heading back to work at noon, their break already over.

Ten-year-old Hyman Lapcoff from Washington, D.C., was photographed carrying a heavy load of newspapers over a long distance. Hine noted that he came from a good family, and that this kind of carrying was “a common occurrence and is bad for the little fellows.” The physical strain of hauling heavy paper bundles over long distances affected children’s developing bodies in ways that were already recognized — and largely ignored.

Seven-year-old Katie in Dunbar, Louisiana, was shucking oysters while sick with the mumps. Her eight-year-old brother worked beside her. The cannery kept running regardless of illness. Children who were sick still came in, because staying home meant no pay — and families couldn’t afford to miss a day’s wages, however small.

Warping machines wound yarn onto beams in preparation for weaving. Operating one required close attention and fast hands, keeping tension even as the machine ran. A young boy photographed at Elk Cotton Mills in Fayetteville, Tennessee, tended a warping machine alone — responsible for a piece of industrial equipment while still years away from what most people would consider a working age.

Nine-year-old Israel April sold newspapers in Washington, D.C., without a badge, which was required by city rules. He had been selling for several years. Hine found him working after midnight on two separate nights. Israel and his brother reportedly sold regularly to ambassadors and senators. The fact that he serviced Washington’s most powerful residents didn’t prevent him from being on the street alone past midnight at age nine.

Six-year-old Earle Holt sold papers on the streets of Washington, D.C., on behalf of a neighbor boy. Hine noted that within an hour of being photographed, Earle had forgotten the encounter entirely — but he still managed to shortchange Hine when he bought a paper. The detail captures something honest about childhood in these circumstances: ordinary kid behavior playing out in a situation that was anything but ordinary.

Hine’s photographs from a furniture factory in Indianapolis in August 1908 show children taking their midday break surrounded by the tools and materials of industrial production. These were not background workers or rare exceptions — they were part of the standard workforce. The factories needed them, the families depended on their wages, and the law offered no protection.

A six-year-old newsboy in Indianapolis, standing 41 inches tall, was photographed selling papers in August 1908. Hine called him “a little shaver” in his notes. At 41 inches, he was barely tall enough to see over a store counter. He was on the street alone, selling papers, trying to make change, navigating traffic — at an age when most children today are still in kindergarten.

Indiana had no minimum age requirement for messenger work at the time Hine visited. The postal telegraph company in Indianapolis took full advantage. Boys of any age could be hired, sent on routes, and kept on duty as late as the company needed. Hine’s documentation of the Indianapolis messengers was part of a broader push to show state lawmakers exactly what the absence of child labor protections looked like in practice.

At a basket factory in Evansville, Indiana, a boy worked at a machine producing melon baskets. Light manufacturing of this kind employed children throughout the Midwest. The work was less dangerous than glass or coal, but it was still full-day labor for small wages, and it kept children out of school. Hine documented facilities like this one to show that child labor was not confined to the South’s mills and mines.

In Falmouth, Massachusetts, eight-year-old Marion Alvez outpicked her twelve-year-old brother Manuel at the cranberry bog. She picked 19 measures to his 10. Children in cranberry and blueberry fields were often paid by the measure, which created direct financial pressure to work faster. Smaller, nimble hands sometimes proved more efficient at close-picking work than older children.

Delivery work put children on wagons and trucks moving through city streets before and after school hours — or instead of them. A boy working as a helper on a dairy wagon in Bowling Green, Kentucky, assisted with early morning routes that started well before daylight. Street-level delivery jobs rarely appeared in labor statistics because they were informal and hard to track.

John Tidwell was a doffer at Avondale Mills in Birmingham, Alabama. Hine labeled him “a cotton mill product” — a phrase that captured exactly how the system worked. Children who grew up in mill towns often started working in the mills as children and stayed there into adulthood, never having had the opportunity to be anything else. Hine noted that many of the young mill workers smoked.

Eleven-year-old Gus was selling celery at Washington’s Center Market at 10:30 p.m. He stayed until 11. The next morning, he was back out selling newspapers. Children in the street trade worked seven days a week when they could, because every day without work meant nothing earned. There was no safety net, no day off with pay, and no minimum wage.

Edwin Cope was working at the “glory hole” — the furnace opening — of a New Jersey glass factory at midnight. He said he was eighteen years old. Hine was not satisfied. He went to Edwin’s mother and asked her to read the birth date from the family record. She read it aloud: March 26, 1896. At the time of the photograph, Edwin Cope was thirteen years old. He was tending a furnace, alone, at midnight.

In Boston in October 1909, Hine photographed children picking through ash barrels — sorting refuse for anything of value. This was among the most destitute forms of child labor documented in his archive. Children who had no access to factory or street jobs scavenged what they could from the city’s waste. The image stands as evidence of how far down the economic ladder child labor extended.

Hine’s photographs were never just images. Each one came with notes — names, ages, wages, hours, and the specific hazards of each job. The goal was to make denial impossible. Factory owners had claimed that children only did light, safe work. The photographs of boys working around unguarded machinery in Baltimore, of children at furnaces at midnight, of six-year-olds starting before dawn, made those claims impossible to sustain.

Harry Laudeman was thirteen years old and had been selling newspapers for seven years — since age six. His seven-year-old brother Morris, standing 46 inches tall, was with him at 8 p.m. in Hartford, Connecticut. Seven years of street selling for Harry meant seven years of interrupted school, seven years of working in traffic and weather, and seven years of carrying the weight of his family’s finances on a child’s shoulders.

Eight-year-old Daisy Langford worked at a capping machine in Ross’ Cannery in Seaford, Delaware. Her job was to place caps on cans at a rate of roughly 40 per minute. Hine noted that she was not able to keep up with the required pace. She was eight years old, working at an industrial machine, being evaluated on her output speed. Hine’s photographs, published in newspapers and magazines across the country, put these faces and facts in front of the American public — and eventually, they could no longer be ignored.