Bath School Bombing: Andrew Kehoe and a Forgotten 1927 Tragedy

The Bath School bombing was a coordinated attack on May 18, 1927, in which Andrew Kehoe, the treasurer of the Bath Consolidated School District in Bath Township, Michigan, detonated hundreds of pounds of explosives he had hidden beneath the school, then set off a second bomb in his truck outside the ruins. The attack killed 45 people, including 38 children, and injured nearly 60 more. Almost a century later, it remains the deadliest act of mass violence at a school in United States history.¹²

Who Andrew Kehoe Was

Kehoe was a farmer and skilled electrician who had lived in the Bath Township community for years. Neighbors described him as petty and quick to anger, charming one moment and hostile the next, prone to taking small slights personally.³

His anger focused on a 1922 property tax increase that Bath Township voters had approved to fund construction of the new consolidated school. The levy hit Kehoe hard. His farm was deeply in debt, compounded by repeated hospitalizations for his wife, Nellie, who had tuberculosis.⁴¹⁵

In 1924, Kehoe won a seat on the school board, where he fought to cut spending. He was appointed township clerk a year later but lost the position in the 1926 election. That public rejection likely deepened his sense of grievance.¹

How He Prepared the Attack

Kehoe’s electrical skills had made him indispensable to the school district. He had been hired to perform electrical installations in the new Bath Consolidated School building, and the work gave him routine, unsupervised access to its basement and crawl spaces.⁴ Over months, he smuggled in dynamite and pyrotol, a surplus World War I incendiary explosive. He placed the charges beneath the flooring of both the north and south wings and wired them for remote detonation.¹

What he hid was staggering. After the disaster, rescue workers found roughly 500 pounds of undetonated explosives still wired beneath the south wing, which meant Kehoe had intended to bring down the entire school. One report placed the total amount of dynamite used at over 1,000 pounds.¹²

What Happened on May 18, 1927

Kehoe launched the attack in stages. A day or so before May 18, he murdered his wife, Nellie. On the morning of the 18th, he used rigged explosives to destroy the buildings on his farm. Investigators who later visited the property found a hand-lettered sign wired to a fence. It read: “Criminals are made, not born.”¹

Shortly before 9 a.m., an alarm clock triggered the explosives Kehoe had planted beneath the school’s north wing. The blast tore through the building, collapsing walls and ceilings onto classrooms full of children. Thirty-six children and two teachers were killed almost instantly.¹

About 30 minutes later, as parents and rescuers swarmed the wreckage, Kehoe drove his truck up to the school. The vehicle was loaded with dynamite and metal shrapnel. School superintendent Emory Huyck approached, and Kehoe fired a rifle into the back seat, detonating the truck. The blast killed Kehoe, Huyck, two other adults, and a child who had survived the initial explosion.¹

Nurses, police officers, and ordinary residents climbed into the demolished ruins to lift fallen walls and pull children from the rubble. Firefighters from Lansing then crawled beneath the still-standing wings to remove the hundreds of pounds of pyrotol that had failed to detonate, working while other sections of the building burned.⁶

The Death Toll

The final toll was 45 dead: 38 children, six adults, and Kehoe himself. One child lingered for nearly a year before dying of injuries sustained in the blast. Close to 60 people were wounded.²¹

The attack still exceeds every subsequent school massacre in American history, including the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, which killed 32, and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, which killed 26.¹⁷

Why the Bath Bombing Faded From Memory

The bombing made national headlines immediately. The New York Times ran the story under the headline “MANIAC BLOWS UP SCHOOL,” a framing that reflected the public’s difficulty categorizing what Kehoe had done.⁵ He was not an anarchist, a foreign radical, or any other figure 1920s America associated with political violence. He was a white farmer in a small town who had killed himself in the act, so there would be no trial or execution to draw the press back to the story.

Three days later, Charles Lindbergh completed his solo transatlantic flight to Paris, and that story consumed the nation’s front pages. The Bath disaster dropped out of the news cycle almost overnight. As one historian put it, everyone outside Bath Township seemed to forget about it entirely. The massacre did not prompt a national conversation about explosives, school safety, or mental health the way a comparable attack would today.⁵

The trauma also remained a taboo subject in Bath itself for generations. Many survivors declined to speak publicly about what they had lived through, and the event was rarely discussed openly in the community.⁸

How Bath Township Remembers It Today

The demolished school was torn down, and the community rebuilt with help from U.S. Senator James Couzens of Michigan, who wrote a personal check for $75,000 to the Bath School Fund.⁹ A new school, named the James Couzens Agricultural School in his honor, opened on the same site in 1928. That building was razed in 1975, and the site became James Couzens Memorial Park, centered on the cupola salvaged from the original 1927 school.¹

The park, at 13753 Main Street in Bath Township, hosts an annual candlelit vigil every May 18, during which community members read the names of the victims.¹⁰

A collection of artifacts, including school memorabilia, news clippings, photographs, and a chair belonging to a student who was in the building during the explosion, has been kept in glass cases in the lobby of the Bath Middle School auditorium since 1984, when disaster survivors led by Jim Hixson founded the Bath School Museum Committee. The display is accessible only by appointment or during public events.¹¹

The committee is now working to build a freestanding museum in James Couzens Memorial Park. Designs revealed in 2024 show a building whose west side would echo the look of the original school, while the east side would feature modern windows providing around-the-clock visibility of the original cupola, which would finally be housed indoors. The project’s estimated cost is $5 million, and as of mid-2026 the committee had raised only a fraction of that amount.¹¹ If the full museum is not complete by May 18, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the bombing, the committee hopes to have at least a memorial garden ready in time for the centennial.¹⁰

1
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bath School Disaster
2
WILX. Vigil To Be Held Monday Marking 99 Years Since Deadly Bath School Bombing
3
MLive. Bombing in Bath, Michigan Book
4
Michigan Advance. The Bath School Bombing at 99
5
TIME. Kehoe Attack History
6
Dykema. Court Legacy – Bath School Disaster
7
ClickOnDetroit. The Small Michigan Town Massacre That Remains Deadliest in US History
8
WKAR. Documentary Series Tells Story of Bath School Disaster Using Survivors Voices
9
Detroit Free Press. Bath Disaster 89th Anniversary
10
WKAR. 99 Years After Bath School Disaster
11
Lansing State Journal. Bath School Disaster Anniversary Museum Proposal