These boots were worn by breaker boy, Evan Jenkins. He worked at the Nanticoke Breaker until his death at the age of eleven from spinal meningitis. The breaker was a multi story processing plant where anthracite was cleaned, crushed and sized. Within breakers boys as young as seven years old sat over the coal chutes leading to the storage pockets. Performing one of the final steps in the process, they removed non-burnable pieces of slate by hand as the sized coal flowed by.