WHAT IS BONEY COAL AND WHAT WERE THE BONEY DUMPS?
I thought you had all heard Dad talk about those who were boney pickers. He did not look down on them because everyone was necessary. There were also nippers, motormen, blasters, loaders. Now there are continuous miners and front end loaders and there are no boney pickers.
"Boney" (or bony) is a type of coal that contains more rock than coal, and it was once sorted out and discarded. Kenilworth did have a high grade of coal but there is no mine that does not have rock and overburden in the coal it produces. Coal is found in seams and some are thicker than others. Kenilworth, and most Utah mines, have deep seams. Remember that lump coal was used to heat homes, rather than the slack which came into use when stokers were invented. Since the coal was mined in larger pieces, there would be larger pieces of stone in it.
In the days before cleaning plants, boney pickers labored inside the tipple and separated good coal from pieces of slate, rock, and sulfur. In the early days of mining, the thankless job paid so little that usually young boys and older men performed this task. Many boys under the age of fifteen used to work up to twelve hour days until laws were passed that required boys to be fifteen years old. Later, the number of hours that boys worked were reduced to protect their health and allow them the time to get an education. Grandpa only graduated from the eighth grade, though he later took mine bossing courses, because he started working so young.
There was a time that the term "boney picker' also denoted a person who was lazy. Older men sometimes chose to be a boney picker to earn just enough money to buy liquor. The term also denoted someone who was poor, because many poor people used to scour the "boney dumps" to pick out usable coal from unwanted coal.
Later the job was more of an entry level job into the mining industry. Unions made certain that all miners were paid a working wage and, as in Kenilworth, housing was available for miners. Of course, there was still a "silk stocking row," where the bosses lived. There was also a company store where, as Johnny Cash sang, many miners owed their "souls to the company store." That was because they could buy on credit and pay when the paycheck came. I think you all remember that Grandma would send you to the store to buy something for her and would tell you to put it on her bill. She would, later, go up and pay off what was owed.
Nowadays, boney coal is crushed into a powdery form and burned at electrical generating plants.
As an aside, there was also a time when young boys were used as chimney sweeps, because their small bodies could fit inside of chimneys. Once inside, they used a special broom to remove the soot from the walls of the chimney that had built up over time. (If chimneys weren't cleaned, smoke would not be able to escape and therefore would back up into the house.) Unfortunately, these boys would breathe in a lot of fine soot that collected in their lungs. Many of them developed a bad cough and many had trouble breathing. Many of them also died young, as young as the age of twenty.
