FYI: These children in the photo are separating Slate attached to Coal at the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad's largest coal mine, in a "breaker" end of the mining process for the King of Coal Corps in late 19th century Pennsylvania. They are doing it with their bare hands and this is no before and or after school part time job. It is dawn to dusk and for pennies an hour.
Oral history in my family is that my grandfather, of McAdoo, Pa., born 1866, a Civil War Boomer, did a similar job at age six in order to supplement income for his sick father, whose health and or immune system had been damaged being a Confederate Prisoner of War, after he helped Sherman burn Atlanta btw. The Vet eventually got a disability pension from the gubmint and died of bowel and or prostate cancer in 1900, two months after surgery at the local Veteran's hospital. Diagnosis rather vague on his autopsy report performed at that same Veteran's facility. But I would assume the above translating their general area of body illness on the document, removal of organs etc., on a copy of that autopsy from back then and from the National Archives.
That being said, probably with temporary improved health of his father and or help from relatives, my grandfather managed to get a standard education from about age 10 onwards and ended up as a grocer and Postmaster of McAdoo, Pa around the death of his father in 1900.
The store and post office burned down shortly thereafter on the timeline and, when past the age of forty, and probably considered unemployable, not unlike to the present day, he migrated with his immediate family to Philly around 1908 and got a gubmint job at the Frankford Arsenal until his death in the 1930s.
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