These look like "clinkers" to me. In my youth we had commercial greenhouses steam heated by coal-fired boilers. Coal was loaded into a hopper with a front loading tractor, then fed into the furnace via an auger at the bottom. As the coal burned, it formed what we called clinkers on top of the fire. A few times a day, depending on weather, the furnace doors were opened and with a 10' iron rake, the clinkers were pulled out onto a steel table. When they cooled, they were hand shoveled into a wheelbarrow and taken outdoors. In the spring they were spread over the dirt roads to the fields. They crumbled under the weight of the tractor and made a nice surface. Limited other uses. Remember "cinder blocks" and cinder tracks for competitive running? And cinders on RR tracks?
I could see steamboats offloading clinkers as they came into port before they banked the fires for the night. And maybe broke them int a size easily managed by a chute or conveyor.
Just a guess without actually handling the product.
Aside: Around 1955-60 the flower growing industry in NE started converting to oil so there was no need to pay a fireman, just as RR started going from steam to diesel. When oil went from $8/ bbl to $14/bbl the NE flower growing industry started shutting down and most flowers are now shipped in.
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