Flavorwire

We’re always fascinated with photographs of times gone by, and so we were immediately taken in by these dusty images of young miners that we spotted over at Environmental Graffiti. The photographs, all sourced from the Library of Congress, show the harsh realities of life at a time where you were expected to be a man and support your family before you’d hit puberty. Though boys were officially supposed to be at least 12 before they could work in the mines, parents looking for extra income would falsify documents to sneak in children as young as five or six. Click through to check out some of the photographs from beneath the earth, and then head over to Environmental Graffiti for even more.