Carl Sandburg began working at an early age. First, he carried a gunny sack and picked up bottles, rags, paper and  scrap metal along the city’s streets and sidewalks. He was paid 18 cents on his most successful day of picking up debris.

By the time he was wearing long pants at the age of eleven, he got a job cleaning the real estate office of Callendar and Rodine on Main Street. It was on the second floor of a building between Kellogg and Prairie. He  would arrive about 7:45 and unlock the office door with the key he had been given. He then swept the previous day’s accumulation of paper, dirt, string, cigar butts and chewing tobacco remnants from the office, across the hallway, down the steps, across the sidewalk and into the street. If a stiff wind was blowing the debris would join the animal droppings and other things in the street to be moved in the direction of the wind.

He also had to clean the spittoons which were sometimes full to the brim. There was a water faucet in a hallway closet with which he could rinse out the smelly containers. Every few weeks he would polish them.

A decade or so later, the Galesburg Woman’s Club was organized. One of their first projects was to clean up the streets of downtown Galesburg. Apparently, throwing refuse in the public streets was still a common practice. The ladies pointed out expectorating tobacco juice on the sidewalks was unsanitary. The women had a good reason for wanting the streets and sidewalks to be clean. They wore long dresses and the skirts often touched the ground or floor. This meant they had to do more brushing and laundering of their clothing.

It was a wearing campaign for the women. The custom of chewing tobacco was a long time falling out of favor with men. When cigarette smoking came into fashion in the early years of the twentieth century, the habit of chewing tobacco leaves gradually began to fade. Of course, the smell of smoking the cigarettes would cling to the clothes of everyone in close proximity.

The manufacturing of chewing tobacco was a large industry in the nineteenth century. Every city had shops and factories in which chewing tobacco was processed as well as cigars. Young children were employed in some of these factories.

On Berrien Street just west of Chambers there was a cigar shop where the Dirty Dozen group of Sandburg’s buddies hung out. Carl and his friends watched “Nig” Bohneneberger roll the leaves and lick them to make cigars. He lost weight and the boys could see that life was ebbing away. He died of consumption.

He had been an avid reader of the daily newspapers. His discussed with the boys the current events of the middle 1890s and helped them to understand some of the problems of those days. There was the problem of the government being on the gold standard, a presidential election and the growth of labor unions. The remnants of the Panic of 1893 were still being felt by many people, especially the working men and women. Wages had been cut as a result. It took a number of years to recover from the losses.

Work was anything you could do that another person was willing to give a man or a boy a few coins for performing.