Bath: The Deadliest School Attack in American History
Near Lansing, Michigan
On the morning of May eighteenth, nineteen twenty-seven, a township official named Andrew Kehoe detonated explosives he had secretly planted beneath the Bath Consolidated School, killing thirty-eight children and six adults. Kehoe, a farmer furious over property taxes and a lost township election, had spent months hiding dynamite under the floorboards. After the first blast he drove a truck loaded with shrapnel and more dynamite to the school and set it off as rescuers arrived.
The attack remains the deadliest act of mass murder at an American school in United States history. The community rebuilt. A new school rose on the same ground, and the township of Bath, just north of Lansing, carries that memory forward nearly a century later.
