The history of Charter Township of Bath

Andrew Kehoe bombed Bath Consolidated School, killing dozens

Bath lies in the flat, fertile middle of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, the larger of the state's two landmasses, now a mix of farmland and small towns south of the Straits of Mackinac. It was a farming township that voted in 1922 to build one consolidated school for its children.

Bath Consolidated School, the site of the Bath Consolidated School, stood almost exactly on this ground. Andrew Kehoe was its school board treasurer, a farmer angry about taxes and bitter after losing an election for township clerk, who also faced foreclosure on his farm. Over months, Kehoe secretly packed explosives under the school's floors.

On the morning of May 18, 1927, Kehoe set off the charges. The blast tore apart the north wing and killed dozens of children inside. As rescuers rushed to dig survivors from the wreckage, Kehoe drove a truck loaded with dynamite and shrapnel to the scene and detonated it, killing himself, the school superintendent, and three others. In all, 38 children and 6 adults died. Before the bombing, Kehoe had also killed his wife and burned his own farmstead to the ground.

Searchers later found 500 more pounds of unexploded dynamite still wired beneath the south wing. Had it gone off, the death toll would have been far higher.

A short walk from here, at Bath Community Hall (former morgue) on Main Street, the dead were laid out that day. Built in 1881 by Newell Dryer as a community hall, it served as a makeshift morgue, then as a temporary school while Bath rebuilt. It later became apartments.

The school site itself became James Couzens Memorial Park in 1975, named for the Michigan senator who helped fund a new school for Bath after the disaster. The park still holds the salvaged cupola from the old building. A marker installed on Main Street in 1992 tells visitors what happened here, between High Street and Clark Road, on a stretch of road that once carried children to class.

Before it was Bath, this ground belonged to Ossowa Township. Settlers renamed it in 1843, after Bath, New York, the birthplace of an early settler named Silas W. Rose. When the railroad reached the area in 1862, a man named Israel VanOstran opened a tavern, and a store soon followed. The village grew up around that stop, a farming community that eventually voted to build one school for all its children.

Bath rebuilt after the bombing. The community pulled together enough money, with help from Senator James Couzens, to put up a new school. The brick hall that had served briefly as a morgue returned to ordinary use, hosting classes until the new building stood, then settling back into life as a community hall. For decades the burned ground on Main Street stayed mostly as it was, a wound the town lived around rather than over.

In 1975, the township turned the old school site into James Couzens Memorial Park, naming it for the man whose money had helped Bath recover. Seventeen years later, in 1992, the state put up a historical marker on Main Street between High Street and Clark Road, laying out the story for anyone who stops to read it.

The old Bath Community Hall (former morgue), a short walk from here, still stands too, long since converted into apartments. It carries no sign of the day bodies were laid out inside it. Main Street itself runs quietly past the park today, a stretch of road that once carried children to school and now carries ordinary local traffic past a stand of trees, a flagpole, and the recovered cupola.