PHOTO VIA TECHNICAL WORLD MAGAZINE

Who built this? Such a simple question.

You merge onto a bridge in Pittsburgh and marvel at the logistical inefficiency as a mad vehicular dance ensues, and you say: “Who built this?” You stand on Mount Washington in 1890 to peer into the fiery red valley of a city churning out flame, smoke and wealth, and you ask: “Who built this?”

Who built Pittsburgh — as it was, as it became? It’s a complex question with enough intersections to make our road patterns look like they were birthed from a rational mind. There are countless correct answers. We can argue it was the industrialists. We can argue it was labor, not capital, that really built Pittsburgh.

There is one group of builders whose voices we have kept silent far too long. Consider it a statement of fact: Child labor built Pittsburgh, too. Their stories, so quieted over time, are still whispered. If we care to listen for them.

Historians have done incredible work telling of the children of our glasshouses. What, though, of the children of the mines, factories, mills and streets? They were coal-pickers, furnace pull-up boys, hook-runners, bolt-threaders, messengers and newsies. They were so important to the uninterrupted flow of our city’s lifeblood that a well-organized strike could cool furnaces, paralyze communications and threaten profits.

Hear the whispers of John Jones, a hoist boy at Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, who was instantly killed in 1877, when a cupola laden with pig iron fell on him after a rope snapped. When Superintendent Bill Jones sent Carnegie word of the accident (which he said crushed John “to a jelly”), he blamed the “boy’s carelessness and disobedience of order.” Jones went on to assure Carnegie that the horrific death only “delayed works slightly. Damage slight.”

Jones, an orphan, was only 14 years old. He built Pittsburgh.

We tend to think of Pittsburgh’s roaring, heaving mills and factories as places for men and only men. To a good extent that was true, but alongside those brawny men — who we’ve rewarded with Joe Magarac levels of mythology — children also toiled in the dark, the damp, the fire. They were pulling open heavy furnace doors, carrying water buckets and navigating tight spaces to hook pipes to fast-moving chains. They were stationed behind tooling machines, their small hands perfect for detail work. They worked eight- to 12-hour shifts for pennies per hour and then played in the streets at night, grasping for any light of their quickly fading childhoods.

Children lost fingers, hands, arms, legs and their lives to Pittsburgh’s machines. In 1894, a 13-year-old Carnegie employee sued for compensation after his arm was severed at the elbow on his third day on the job. In court, the Carnegie Co. faulted the boy’s immaturity for not taking the dangers of the machine seriously.

The court sided with Carnegie.

There was Joseph Kprivia, the sole support of his siblings and his blind mother, who was killed alongside another boy at Homestead Works after they fell asleep on the job, leading to an accident. He was 15 and had worked eight hours of his 13-hour shift. There was the 12-year-old who lost his arm while feeding pieces of steel through rolls in 1909. There was the 14-year-old running-hook who was disemboweled when he was caught and carried by a hook at a Pittsburgh tube mill. William Rock, 14, was killed while trying to put a belt on a pulley at Pittsburgh Brewing Co in 1906. Frank Lenox, 13, slipped and fell into a tempering machine at Harper Brick Works that same year.

Each one of them built Pittsburgh.

Don’t ever think that the number of children who built Pittsburgh was insignificant. There were 120 boys employed as rivet-heaters at Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Works in 1898. In 1901, there were 800 boys in just one department at National Tube Works — and 150 boys in another. There were 150 heater boys at the Pressed Steel Car Co. in 1901.

Don’t ever think they didn’t fight for more. For better. They formed unions. They spoke up in unison, marched in unison and struck when their own was treated unfairly. Paid significantly less than adult laborers, they were employed in such numbers that they became powerful. Manufacturing bosses were regularly forced to grapple with shutdowns that threw adult men out of work when boys (and girls) walked away from their posts and machines or marched in picket lines to throw shame (and sometimes objects) at any scab who crossed it. A striking messenger boy declared of such scabs in 1907, “There’s not a real, red-blooded fighting man in the whole bunch of them.”

There were the 50 furnace pull-up boys who struck from Carnegie’s Union Iron Works after their daily wages were reduced to 55 cents. In 1888, 83 pull-up boys struck from another Carnegie mill, demanding an increase in pay. A massive group of child laborers struck from Oliver Iron and Steel Co. in 1913. The strike began with 100 young girls responsible for two to three bolt-threading machines each — machines that were once operated by men. Soon, another 800 Oliver children joined them. Photos from their picket line show they marched with signs pleading, “More bread, more education, more sunshine,” and, “We are earning 60 cents a day for 12 hours.”

Every one of them built Pittsburgh.

When Pittsburgh’s newsboys formed the Local Newsboys’ Union in 1891, the superintendent of the donation-funded home for newsboys threatened them with arrest. They fought back and published a letter in the local press in which they threatened to expose fiscal mismanagement at the home. With a sense of justice beyond their years, they wrote, “We, the members of the union, live at home, and as such respect the rights of our homeless brothers. Yet in the near future we shall show to the public … what became of a generous donation.”

In 1907, telegraph messenger boys struck in solidarity with female operators and quickly called a meeting of the city’s entire messenger force at the wharf where they formed a union, elected officers, and collected donations for a destitute messenger who had been fired and made homeless. Newly elected secretary Lewis Harris, 15, said passionately, “Our fight is not one in which people starve.” As the boys made plans for continued agitation to increase meager wages, the new union’s president, 17-year-old Charles Stranahan, encouraged his fellow brothers to wage a fair fight, saying, “Don’t raise any hell unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Pittsburgh’s child laborers were expected to work and behave as adults but to be satisfied with being paid as children. When they took the mature route of organizing for improved wages and hours, bosses and journalists alike often dismissed them as spoiled, lazy children who simply didn’t know what was best for themselves. Across the years, striking child laborers were labeled as “vindictive youngsters” and “little belligerents.” They were regularly accused of striking merely because they wanted a few days off to play in the sun.

Regardless of how adults portrayed them, the children saw themselves as legitimate laborers deserving of the respect earned through 12-hour days at oftentimes dangerous jobs. They believed the damage to their bodies, health and minds should have afforded them adequate compensation. When telegraph messengers struck in 1899, one boy pushed back against accusations that they weren’t serious, saying, “You can put it in the paper that we are still out, and we want our price or we don’t go back to work.”

Were they children begging for bread, sun, education and play? Were they adults standing at heaving machines for long hours as cogs in a city’s wealth-generating machinery? In truth, they were forced to straddle a confusing space between the two.

Pittsburgh is more than her visible structures. She was built of steel, stone and brick, certainly, but she was also built of blood, sweat and fire. Every shred of her blue-collar ethic that remains evident today was fashioned across centuries. It was built by men. It was built by women. By industrialists. By capital. By labor.

And it was built by children who saw in themselves so much more than the adults who failed them did. They still whisper of all they lost, if we choose to hear it, and of all they gave to Pittsburgh, if we choose to honor it.

In her column, Virginia Montanez digs deep into local history to find the forgotten secrets of Pittsburgh. Sign up for her newsletter at: breathingspace.substack.com.