The Bath School Disaster: The Story of the 1st US School Bombing

In 1927, in a small town in Michigan, children and teachers walked into class, celebrating their last day of school before summer break. But within an hour, half of the school was reduced to rubble as dynamite brought down the building. Those inside were trapped under the debris and parents rushed to save their children. The explosion was devastating – but who caused it, and why, threatened to shatter the town. It remains the deadliest act of school violence in U.S. history. 

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Team & Contributors

Executive Producer- Clare O'Donohue 
https://clareodonohue.com

Executive Producer - Margaret Smith

Editor – Steph Kelly

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IT Manager - Conor Sweeney

The History of Murder Logo - Bernadette Carr
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Theme Song “My Carnal Life I Will Lay Down” - Rob Brereton
https://robertbrereton.com
 
Voice of Monty Ellsworth: Mitchell Bisschop

Interview: Susan Hagerman
Bath School Museum
https://bathschoolmuseum.org/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Bath, Michigan, 1927. On May 18, 236 students and teachers walked into school to begin their last day before summer break. Under their feet was a thousand pounds of dynamite. It would become the deadliest act of school violence in U.S. history. It's the history of murder, and I'm your host, Claire O'Donohue. It should have been an ordinary day. Susan Hagerman, the president of the Bath School Museum, said it was for a while.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

My dad was nine years old, he was in the third grade. He was in Miss Weatherby's class. She was a sweetheart. Everyone loved her. She had been reading a story to them. She read to them every day, and she would get to an exciting part and then stop until the next day. Well, this day they convinced her to read a little bit more. But the story suddenly ended when the school exploded. The floor came up and the ceiling came down on them. There was a lot of chaos. The roof fell down on top of everything, and so they weren't able to go in and start digging children out.

SPEAKER_03 1:19

Susan's dad, Raymond Eschuth, was one of the children trapped inside.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

He got buried. All he could see was a little peephole of light in the ceiling above him, and he kept calling for help. When nobody came, he just in his mind went over what he had done that morning, just to pass time, and by then somebody had rescued him, took him out, set him on the ground up against a tree in the front yard.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Raymond had a broken leg, but he was alive. He was one of the lucky ones in what was in that moment inexplicable. But a second explosion would lead the community to a horrific explanation.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Before we continue, please remember to leave a comment, like the video, and subscribe to our channel. It will help us continue to make new content. Now, back to the story.

SPEAKER_03 2:16

His book, The Bath School Disaster, is a first-hand account of the events.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

I was planning melons northeast of my house. A tremendous explosion came. My wife, who was upstairs cleaning house, ran to the window facing east. She yelled, My God, the schoolhouse is blown up!

SPEAKER_03 2:35

Ellsworth and his wife raced toward the school, where they had a son in the second grade. He was okay. Then Ellsworth joined in the rescue efforts.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

He went home and got a tractor and a big long pole and a rope, and they were able to hoist up the roof so they could start looking for the bodies.

SPEAKER_03 2:55

It was a grim task. Ellsworth described what the rescuers found.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

There was a pile of children, about five or six, under the roof, and some of them had arms sticking out, some had legs, and some just heads sticking out. They were unrecognizable because they were covered in dust, plastered, blood.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

And as they dug bodies out, they would lay the bodies of the kids in the front yard and cover them up with blankets. If the parents came up and didn't find their children in the survivors, they had to lift the blankets to try to identify their children. If the body was too badly damaged, they would have to look at their feet and see if they could recognize their shoes.

SPEAKER_03 3:40

About a half an hour after the blast, a local farmer named Andrew Keho arrived on the scene. Kehoe, 55, was not a native of the town, but he had become an integral part of it. He served on the school board and often helped in the school doing electrical work, plumbing, and other repairs. Ellsworth had seen Keho just after the explosion, when Ellsworth was going home to find items to raise the school roof.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

I met Kehoe in his car going towards Bath. He grinned and waved his hand. When he grinned, I could see both rows of his teeth. In fact, I can see him now.

SPEAKER_03 4:20

Keyhoe was parked near the site of the explosion and could see that only the north wing of the school was destroyed. The south wing was still standing, and all of the children who had been there had been rescued. Keho called the school superintendent, Emory Hike, to his truck. A young girl heard the exchange between the two men who vehemently disliked each other.

SPEAKER_02 4:43

Keho had this really strange grin on his face. And at that time she heard Hike say, You had something to do with this. I know you did. And then Keho shot into the back of his truck, blew it up, killing himself, Emory Hike, the postmaster, and two other bystanders, plus an eight-year-old little boy who had survived the school explosion.

SPEAKER_03 5:10

Ellsworth was taking a break from the rescue efforts and was standing nearby when Kehoe's car exploded.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

I stood there almost paralyzed for a few moments, and I didn't know what to do. And someone stood by me and said, Well, we must get those dead bodies out of the cars.

SPEAKER_03 5:27

It was then that the town knew this wasn't an accident. It was murder. And the likely killer was Andrew Kehoe. But why?

SPEAKER_02 5:37

He grew up in Tecumseh, Michigan. He was one of twelve children. He went to school at Michigan College, which is now Michigan State University, got a degree in electrical engineering. He was very smart, was very handy, he could do most anything.

SPEAKER_03 5:52

At college he met Ellen Price, known to everyone as Nellie. The two dated briefly before going their separate ways. Kiho drifted, getting several jobs before returning to his father's home sometime in the early part of the century. But he didn't like it there. After the death of Kehoe's mother, his father had married a widow named Frances Wilder. Kiho did not get along with his new stepmother. In September 1911, Francis was making lunch. When she struck a match to light the gas burner, flames leapt from the stove and set Francis on fire. Kiho was nearby and threw water on her, which only made things worse, as water helped the oil spread on her skin, making the flames larger. Kiho then went to a neighbor to call for help, as the farm didn't have a telephone.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

And he stood there and watched her burn, and then casually walked over to the neighbor's house and said, Would you mind calling the doctor? My stepmother has been burned. And called the priest and went back home.

SPEAKER_03 6:59

Francis died later that night. The official explanation was that there had been some kind of defect in the stove, changing the temperature of the flame from 495 degrees to somewhere between 600 and 800, and causing the flame to jump from the stove to Francis.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Nobody thought anything of it at the time because that could happen. It was realistic. Kerosene blows up, oil blows up. After this explosion in the school, people started thinking that's probably was his fault.

SPEAKER_03 7:32

Seven months after his stepmother's death, Giho married Nellie Price. The two had rekindled their college romance. She grew up here. Everyone loved her.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

She was very sweet. And they dated for a few years and then got married and moved into a farm about half mile away from here. The farm was owned by Nellie's family.

SPEAKER_03 7:55

They were very wealthy. The farm was 80 acres with a three-story house that had been the property of Nellie's uncle Lawrence Price, who made his fortune manufacturing car parts for Henry Ford. His heirs had sold the farm to Kehoe for $12,000, about $225,000 now, with a private mortgage that they held. Though it was a nice deal for Keho, it was an odd choice for a man who preferred a three-piece suit to overalls.

SPEAKER_02 8:23

He could have been very well off, but he did not harm the property. He didn't like to get dirty. If he'd go out and work in the field, if he got dirty at all, he would go in the house, wash up, and put on a clean suit.

SPEAKER_03 8:35

He bought expensive farm equipment and tools, which mainly sat unused. The only thing he seemed to enjoy was dynamiting tree stumps to make his farmland level, though unplanted. The one thing he did work on the farm was the horses.

SPEAKER_02 8:51

He worked them all day and wouldn't let them rest. One of them finally collapsed, and when it wouldn't get up, he beat it to death.

SPEAKER_03 8:58

He had his sights on things beyond farming, mainly the school board, and for a very specific reason, property taxes. The school had been getting larger and more expensive in recent years.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

Originally, it started out as a one-room school building, and then it was school number four. There were 12 one-room school buildings throughout the district. And then in 1873, they built a two-story brick building which housed kindergarten through the tenth grade. They called that school number four still. And then in 1922 is when they built the consolidated school.

SPEAKER_03 9:44

A World War I veteran, he went to college after the military and became a school teacher. And he was very nice. Kehoe's valuation on his eighty acre farm was ten thousand dollars. His taxes went up by over sixty-five, about twelve hundred dollars today. His house was bigger.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

They had indoor plumbing, indoor heating, indoor water. His taxes were higher because of that, and that was the beginning of his anger. So he started talking to people about if you put me on the township board, I'll get the taxes lower.

SPEAKER_03 10:47

In July 1924, he was elected to a three-year term on the school board where he served as treasurer. Less than a year later, he was also appointed to fill a vacant seat on the township board. And by the summer of 1926, he was asked to help with repairs at the school. Because of that, he got keys and full access to the building. People liked him at that point. The kids liked him.

SPEAKER_02 11:12

He would greet the kids at the door every morning. They all liked him. He was very handy. He seemed friendly to everybody. Not everybody.

SPEAKER_03 11:23

On the school board, Ellsworth noted he was quickly making enemies.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

He seemed to have no use for the superintendent, Mr. E. E. Heike. As soon as he was on the board, he started to get rid of him.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

He did not like him at all. They would be at a school board meeting, and if Mr. Heike said anything that Kehoe didn't like, he would say, let's just adjourn.

SPEAKER_03 11:45

Hike was determined that the children of Bath would receive the best education he could give them. Mr.

SPEAKER_02 11:51

Heike got this consolidated school involved in debate teams, and they won awards for that. And he got the school accredited through the University of Michigan, which made it available for uh federal funding for the school. Plus, the teachers of an accredited school had to have a higher education than the one of them school building teachers.

SPEAKER_03 12:11

Kehoe was doing everything to stop Hike's plans by getting nowhere, especially as support for Hike grew.

SPEAKER_02 12:18

The farmers around the district, they were not rich, and some of them did not like having their taxes raised. Some of them thought the kids' education is most important. It's our priority. We're willing to sacrifice. And eventually everybody came over to that side. Their education was very important to the parents.

SPEAKER_03 12:38

In 1926, Kehoe's reputation as a smart but confrontational man cost him his re-election to the township board. A year later, he ran for justice of the peace and was defeated again. And his personal life wasn't going well either. Nellie had been diagnosed with tuberculosis.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

She was in and out of the hospital a lot, in and out of doctor appointments. She didn't drive, so the neighbor always took her to her appointments and stuff.

SPEAKER_03 13:09

Her illness meant medical bills were piling up. And that wasn't the only thing that Kiho didn't pay. His mortgage on the farm was another bill on the pile.

SPEAKER_02 13:19

He got behind in payments that was going to be foreclosed on, but because it belonged in the family, they held off as long as possible. And he didn't care about it.

SPEAKER_03 13:30

He had no intention of paying for it. At some point, Kiho came up with a plan to get back at the school superintendent, the townspeople for going along with raised taxes, and even his wife's family for foreclosing on the farm. And he looked to the one item he used on his farm as his method of revenge, dynamite.

SPEAKER_02 13:53

Back then, it was very common for farmers to get dynamite to blow stumps out of the field so they could clear the field for their crops. So nobody questioned it. If he got an extra large amount at any one time, he would just say, Well, whatever I don't use, I'll sell to my neighbors. And there was one point where the railroad uh was doing some work. They had a box of dynamite that came up missing. And so people just assumed that he's the one that took that.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

Because he had keys and full access to the school, his presence there any time of the day did not raise any questions.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

He deliberately and meticulously purchased ahead of time dynamite and pyrotol and deliberately and um put it in the school building over several occasions, tucked it up in the ceiling of the basement where it could not be seen, even by the janitor that was in the basement every day. Some of her friends stopped by the house. They wanted to visit her because she just got home, and Quiho says, Well, I took her down to Jackson to visit some friends. Nobody questioned it. It seemed realistic, and so that was the last anyone had seen or heard from her.

SPEAKER_03 15:16

But of course, Nellie was not visiting friends. She was his first victim.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

Sometime between the day he brought her home and the morning on the 18th, he hit her in the head and killed her. And then tied her body to a cart behind the house next to one of the buildings, one of the outbuildings.

SPEAKER_03 15:37

He set the body on fire. Then he went into town, stood by the school door, and greeted the children as they walked in.

SPEAKER_02 15:46

The timer was set to go off at 8 45 in the school, because that's when school started. He wanted to be sure everybody was in it. It was the last really full day of school at the end of the year. Some kids were taking exams. Some kids, if they had a good grade average, they didn't have to be there to take exams. Some of the seniors were in the Methodist Church, which was right next to the where the school was, and it's still there today. They were practicing for commencement, which was supposed to take place in the next day or two. And then there's the handful that, of course, are sick.

SPEAKER_03 16:22

There were, according to reports, 236 students, teachers, and school workers in the building at 8 45 a.m. when the timer in the north wing set off the explosion.

SPEAKER_02 16:35

There were two timers, one for the north wing, one for the south wing. When the first explosion happened, the north wing blew up. There was not enough power left to ignite the timer of the second half of the building. And that's the only reason that the whole building didn't blow up and kill everybody. It would have taken out the whole town of Bath, which is only about a half a block away from here.

SPEAKER_03 17:00

Keho drove his truck around town waiting. About a half an hour after the explosion, he went back to the school.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

He went back up and drove by it and noticed that only half of it had gone off. And not only that, Mr. Height was still alive. He was standing out in the yard helping. He had loaded his truck up at some point with shrapnel, broken glass, um, metal pieces, anything. Put dynamite underneath it, had his rifle in his car, and he drove up to the school and saw that he didn't succeed in what he had planned.

SPEAKER_03 17:37

And that made him very, very angry. That was when he called school superintendent Emery Hike to his truck, shot into it, and exploded it. The shrapnel went everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

When Kehoe had driven his car up and blew it up, it scared my dad so bad he jumped up and ran across the yard to an aunt's house that lived across the road, not realizing he had a broken leg.

SPEAKER_03 18:01

Raymond's family knew that one child, though injured, was safe. But he had siblings registered at the school.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

He had two sisters. One was in the fifth grade, one was in the sixth grade. They were they were injured. One aunt had a broken arm, and the other one was mostly trauma. She got pinned against the wall with something. There was his younger brother who was in the either kindergarten or first grade. He was in the section that didn't get damaged, so he was okay. His older sister was a senior that year, the class of 1927. She was in the church, and the church uh blew off its foundation, windows shattered, pews scattered all over inside. I don't believe there were any injuries to the people that were in there. Another one of his brothers was outside and helping with the cleanup. My dad and my two aunts were all in the hospital for about 10 days. He had a head injury, a little bit of a head injury.

SPEAKER_03 19:00

Raymond's entire family survived, but for other families, there was only heartbreak.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

One little girl had gotten a doll for her birthday and had begged her mother that morning to take it to school, and mom didn't want her to because she thought it'd get dirty or lose it. Finally, she allowed the little girl to take it, and the little girl was killed, and they found her doll in the rubble. Another family had four kids in school, three of them were killed.

SPEAKER_03 19:27

Mothers and fathers pulled at the debris as rescuers like Monty Ellsworth worked beside them, understanding the special urgency to get every last person out of the building.

SPEAKER_01 19:38

It's a miracle that many parents didn't lose their minds before the task of getting their children out of the ruins was completed.

SPEAKER_03 19:45

As the rescuers dug, they found 21-year-old teacher Hazel Weatherby, who had been reading a story to the children when the dynamite exploded.

SPEAKER_02 19:55

When they found her, she had a dead child in each arm, she's protecting her students right up to the end. She was still alive, but after they got her out, she passed away short very shortly after that.

SPEAKER_03 20:08

And it wasn't just the deaths and injuries. The blast left everyone with trauma.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

One little boy in the kindergarten was so traumatized, he picked up his chair, that's what that chair is over there, ran home with that.

SPEAKER_03 20:23

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, Ellsworth wrote that the town did everything they could to help.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Dr. and Mrs. Crumb, who were a doctor and nurse in the World War, now run a drugstore in Bath. They practically turned their store and home into a hospital where they gave all the attention in their power.

SPEAKER_03 20:43

James and Agatha Crumb opened their store to the Red Cross, who set up their headquarters there. Seriously injured children were rushed to the hospital. Nurses wrote the medication given to the children on pieces of paper and pinned it to their clothes. Ambulances were coming.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

The hospitals had put out notices to off-duty doctors and nurses. Come back in, we need you now. And they came from Lansing, they came from all over to help.

SPEAKER_03 21:11

According to Ellsworth, while the men dug through the rubble, the women began making coffee and sandwiches for the relief workers, but they were running out.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

A big relief came to these ladies during the afternoon when the Lawrence Baking Company of Lansing sent out a truckload of pies and sandwiches, which were served in the community hall during the afternoon and evening. Many thanks to Mr. Lawrence.

SPEAKER_03 21:36

But there was one problem, and it made those crucial hours after the explosion more difficult.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

The uh people that were trying to take their kids to the hospital had trouble getting through the road because of all the sightseers. At one point the sightseer started putting blankets in the yard and sitting and watching it. Probably it was after the rescuing. Got done.

SPEAKER_03 22:01

They would go up to the debris and take out souvenirs. At some point in the day, people began to realize that Keho had brought his wife home from the hospital the night before. A new panic went through the crowd to check on her. But the alarm had already been raised by a neighbor.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

The neighbor was in her chicken coop working and she heard a thump on the roof and went out to see what it was and noticed his house was burning. So she called the switchboard operator, told him there's a fire at the Kehoe farm, get help here. So people came and they were trying to get furniture out of the house to save what they could, and then somebody noticed that there was dynamite in the drawers and under the carpet. And they said, just get out, run for your lives, don't worry about anything.

SPEAKER_03 22:48

Keho had even tied the horses in the barn and wired their feet together so they couldn't escape the fire.

SPEAKER_02 22:55

He didn't want anything to be able to use, be used by anybody. He even girded all of his trees so that they wouldn't fall over, but it was enough that they would die.

SPEAKER_03 23:08

He had cut all of his bushes so that they would die. In the chaos of the scene, no one found Nellie's body, which was still on a cart behind the house.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

People walked by where she was, uh where her body was all that first day. Probably hundreds of people, and nobody noticed her. And then the next day, somebody happened to be walking by and says, Well, that looks like a a skull there. And that was her body. It had just been burned so badly it was unrecognizable.

SPEAKER_03 23:42

But there was something that Andrew Kehoe had left, untouched by his destruction.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

He made a sign, he stenciled the words, criminals are made, not born, and fastened it in one of the fences.

SPEAKER_03 23:55

Kehoe's house burned to the ground. His property was destroyed. Word got back to the rescuers of the school, and the full horror of the day was clear. But they kept working. It was five or six in the evening before the last body was taken out, and something else had to be removed. Unexploded dynamite.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

The police and everybody were in the back of the building. There was a small hole, probably about this big, in the wall going into the basement. They were all too big to go into it. They couldn't get in, but they needed to find out if there was any more in there. There was a man standing there. Chester Sweet was his name. His family was from around here. They're still around here. Very small built man. He offered to go in and pulled out another 500 pounds of dynamite that did not go off.

SPEAKER_03 24:48

The desk toll was not as high as Keho had planned, but it was still high.

SPEAKER_02 24:53

There were 38 children, and altogether there was 45. We include Nellie in that count. We don't include Kehoe.

SPEAKER_03 25:03

With the rescue over and the injured hospitalized, the town gathered to hold funerals for their loved ones.

SPEAKER_02 25:11

There were four and five a day, four or five in the morning, then four or five in the afternoon. Um, and the families supported each other. Even though they may have lost a child, they would support their friends and go to their funerals. The ministers eagan had lost children. They were grieving while they were doing funeral services.

SPEAKER_03 25:35

The next step was an inquest to determine if Kehoe had acted alone.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

They needed to find that out right away, and they just said yes, he did act alone, and that he was sane, because he meticulously and deliberately went out various times and purchased the explosives, hid them, and then meticulously put them in the bottom of the floors of the school and planted them so well that people didn't even know they were there over a period of time. So they said that shows that he planned it. He knew what he was doing.

SPEAKER_03 26:12

Once the funerals and the inquest were over, the people of Bath put Quiho's revenge behind them.

SPEAKER_02 26:20

They were strong, resilient people. They had their farms to run, they couldn't just sit back and greed. They had to take care of the animals, they had to take care of the crops, they had children to take care of, they moved forward. People didn't talk about things back then. They kept things to themselves and they just moved forward. And that included the children. The uh stores downtown opened their doors up for classrooms, and so the kids were able to continue their educations. The parents wanted them to continue. And the school exploded on May 18, 1927. In October 1928, the new building was opened for classes.

SPEAKER_03 27:01

The new school was thanks in large part to a generous donation from Michigan Senator James Cousins.

SPEAKER_02 27:07

He was out of Detroit area, and we were in his district. He came up and was helping, and he ended up donating $75,000 out of his own pocket to rebuild, and that's why it was called named the James Cousins Agricultural School.

SPEAKER_03 27:24

That $75,000 is $1.5 million today. The plan was to use the undestroyed portion of the school, strengthened and rearranged, and according to Monty Ellsworth, updated as well.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

The main feature of the new part is a fine community room and gymnasium fitted with a stage and boys and girls' shower and locker rooms. Spacious rooms are provided for manual arts, home economics, and agriculture. The building is plannedly to correlate the everyday problem of the rural community with book learning. I don't know words large enough to express the gratitude of this community to the honorable Mr. James Cousins.

SPEAKER_03 28:06

The governor of Michigan, Fred Green, visited the site on the day of the explosion, worked with a committee on the rebuild, and spearheaded a fundraiser that got Michigan children involved.

SPEAKER_02 28:17

He put out a plea, said, Children, send your pennies, send your money. These people need your help. So the donation started coming in, and they used that money to hire a sculptor. Carlton Angel was out of Ann Arbor. He was a very well-known sculptor. He decided on using a little girl standing holding her cat to portray innocence because the children were definitely innocent. And that's what she's called, the little girl with the cat. She's very special to everybody, all the alumni. When they rebuilt the school, the James Cousins School, as you walked in the front door across the hall, she had her own little alcove. It was mosaic tile, and she sat in there on a pedestal. And kids would say that when they would walk into school each morning, they would go up and lay their hand on her and know that it would be okay that day.

SPEAKER_03 29:13

The school was eventually demolished and a new school was built across the street in 1975. The site of the old school is now the James Cousins Park, with a memorial to the victims of the explosion. One feature is a cupola from the original school, which, like the town, survived Kehoe's revenge. Though the Bath School Museum is currently housed in the new school, there are plans to build a separate museum to honor the school's alums, including those who died and those who survived that horrible day. Raymond Eschruth, Susan's father, lived to be 84 years old.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

People ask me all the time, they asked all of us, what was it like growing up with a survivor? I don't know. Nobody talked about it. I knew something happened. We knew dad was in the explosion. That's it. It wasn't until I got involved in the museum since the early 2000s that I started learning details and more about it. If anybody talked to any of the survivors, even way into adulthood, about it, they would cry. Any loud noises would frighten them.

SPEAKER_03 30:27

Monty Ellsworth, who had written down the experience while it was still fresh, lived until 1974. He was 87. It's likely the events of May 18, 1927 never left him.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

There were sights that I hope no one will ever have to look at again.