Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (3 page)

The ordinance divvied up these virgin lands into what were known as “township areas,” some of which amounted to a few acres, others the size of entire states.
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Eleven years later, the Continental Congress set in motion laws that allowed sale of these northwestern lands, ultimately beginning what was known as Manifest Destiny, the God-given right of the United States to control and expand into the continent of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. The lands feeding off the Great Lakes in the north were particularly favorable to early pioneers. With their untold resources, these regions were ideal places for development. The territory of Michigan was established in 1805, and with the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 white settlers came in droves.

On March 2, 1831, a part of the territory was declared to be Clinton
County, named after Dewitt Clinton, the governor of New York.
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It was an exemplary spot to begin life in this world. In 1836, Ira Cushman, a New York resident with roots that stretched back to the
Mayflower,
settled in Clinton County. He built a log cabin, raised corn, potatoes, and wheat, then sent for his father and brothers. Cushman’s descendants would prosper throughout Clinton County well into the next century.
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More pioneers—of English, Irish, Scottish, and German extraction— soon followed. Silas Rose, another New Yorker, came in 1837.
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With his wife and five children, three teams of oxen, two cows, and a powerful desire to farm the land, Rose carved out a section of woods as his family’s homestead. He named the area Bath in honor of his hometown in New York state, a town that itself was named after the ancient city of Roman baths in central England.
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The first schoolhouse, a simple one-room affair, was founded in 1840 to accommodate the dozen or so children of the area.
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Clinton County was gradually subdivided into townships; Bath Township was officially founded in the spring of 1843 with its first election held on April 18.
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Expansion continued. The 1860 census showed 515 people living in the area, the majority of them farmers.
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More one-room schoolhouses emerged to accommodate the children of the growing farming population. The sons of Bath joined the fight for the Union during the Civil War. A Baptist church was founded in 1868, the Methodist congregation in 1869.
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A sawmill and a brick factory followed. They provided the grist for more building. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bath was a flourishing village and the center of a growing township. Businesses lined the small streets, providing everything a farming community could ask for: food, supplies, and a post office. As the railroad pushed its way across the country to the Pacific coast, the town built a train depot.
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With the depot came something one wouldn’t expect in such a small burg: a hotel. It made an excellent way station for travelers in need of a hot meal and simple room for the night.

What Bath Township lacked was a central school system.

Small schoolhouses still dotted the region. Students, ranging from kindergarten to high school seniors, learned together under the confines of one roof in one room. As the area grew, the township divided the map into school districts. Fractional schools were built so neighboring school districts could be served by a single facility.
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For the time being, this satisfied the needs of the region. The school year was based on
the agrarian calendar. Students attended classes from fall (the end of the harvest season) to spring (the beginning of the planting season). Summers were reserved for the growing season, when every hand was needed on the family farm. Children learned farming basics: chores; milking cows; shearing sheep; and planting, nurturing, and harvesting crops.

While Bath remained a quiet, though steadily growing community, its placement in the hinterlands of Michigan kept it out of step with much of what was going on in the more industrialized parts of the country. After much experimentation, Thomas Edison, the inventor known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” used his New Jersey laboratory to create a system wherein the power of controlled electricity could be channeled through wires into his new invention: the light bulb. From there his experiments grew in scope and impact. By 1882, New York City had the first electric power plant in the United States, providing energy at the flick of a switch for fifty-nine customers. Within a few years, such plants were springing up across urban areas throughout the world, providing a cheap and safe form of power to millions. Electric lights shone on Americans from coast-to-coast, spread throughout European capitals, and into vast Mother Russia.
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Yet Bath, like so many rural areas across the United States, remained without this new power. Local sawmills, so vital to building in the region, continued to rely on steam-based power. The steam engine was a mobile creature. It could be used for lumbering in wooded areas or to run farm machinery such as tractors and heavy-duty equipment to construct homes or raise a barn.
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Another basic source of power—farm animals—was a Bath staple. Oxen were used for plowing; eventually the heavy-muscled and thick-brained creatures gave way to sleeker models in the form of horses. Horses moved faster, which certainly improved the speed of farm work. They also offered more options for transportation; rather than using a slow-moving animal to pull a cart to town, people had the choice of a team of horses or riding a solo mount—something a farmer wouldn’t dream of doing with an ox.
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In 1907 Fred Glass, the local druggist, assembled
The Pocket Directory of Bath, Michigan.
The booklet provided readers with a list of businesses vital to the local economy. Many of the enterprises served multiple roles. The local grocery store sold dry goods along with “Men’s and Ladies’ Furnishings and Working Garments.” James Sweeney, a notary public, wore several hats with interests in money lending, real estate, and insurance
. There were a few blacksmiths available for repairing wood and iron machinery or shoeing horses. The directory read like a utopian layout for the tiny community. An advertisement for A. B. Klooz’s hardware store summed up the general feeling about area commerce.

So bring me your hardware troubles

To me they are but joys;

And they will disappear like soapsuds bubbles

You blew when girls and boys—

As the twentieth century marched forward, a grain elevator towered majestically over downtown. A stockyard and hatchery provided new services for people used to basic butchering on their own farms. The first town bank was opened in 1910.
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To the east lay Detroit, where Henry Ford pioneered a new form of transportation: the automobile. These gasoline-powered machines promised to bring a faster, more efficient form of mobility to the burgeoning community. By the mid-1910s, automobiles and trucks regularly traversed the dusty roads crisscrossing Bath. Although it had no central source of electricity, Bath was thriving as a model of a small-town modern community.
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On June 28, 1914, far away from Bath in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Principfifred a gun, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. This assassination set off a series of events that led to war among European nations. It was a truly modern war. Trenches, dug as protection for soldiers, lined the continent. Countryside regions turned into bloody and scarred battlefields. Another modern invention, the airplane, dropped bombs and fired bullets from the sky. Dynamite blew up land and men. Pyrotol served the same deadly purpose as dynamite.

Dynamite—ignitable tubes developed in the 1860s by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel—was made up of three parts nitroglycerin, one part diatomaceous earth, and a small admixture of sodium carbonate. It had tremendous power to destroy, saving time and labor in construction and providing an effective weapon during wartime.
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Pyrotol, an alternative to dynamite used extensively on the fields of battle, was a smokeless but potent mixture of nitroglycerin, guncotton, and petrolatum. The
chemicals were dissolved in acetone, dried, then forced through a die to make thin brown cords.
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The United States was neutral but kept a wary eye on Europe as the Great War raged on. On May 17, 1915, a German submarine torpedoed the
Lusitania,
a British luxury liner. In just eighteen minutes the mighty ship was gone, killing 1,198 of the passengers on board, 128 of whom were Americans, sparking outrage among citizens throughout the country. Still President Woodrow Wilson maintained neutrality, a position that did not last long. The Germans grew bolder, taking out American merchant vessels carrying munitions and other supplies to Great Britain. Finally, on April 6, 1917, the United States joined the Allied forces in the fight. The battle raged for another year, but the Allies valiantly held on to victory. Cease-fire came at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Celebrations sprang up throughout towns large and small around the globe.

The revelry extended to Bath, which had seen its share of sons volunteer—and in some cases make the ultimate sacrifice—for the “War to End All Wars.” Willis Cressman, then a child of seven, joined his family and neighbors in the festivities. He held his ears as people enthusiastically celebrated by setting off dynamite in the streets.
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Some remembered him being quite friendly to children.

“He was the nicest man,” recalled one survivor. If he was at the school when children arrived in the morning, he would always smile and say hello.
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A neighbor swore that “he never saw a saner man” than Kehoe.
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Another survivor remembered that as Kehoe drove up on his way to the school on the morning of May 18 he tipped his hat to her. Kehoe waited politely until she crossed the street, then resumed the drive toward his target.
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Just who was Andrew P. Kehoe? A benevolent man who cared about youngsters? Never a saner man? A gentleman to a little girl as he drove toward destruction? “The world’s worst demon,”
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(as one writer dubbed him), for planning the bombing of a schoolhouse full of children?

The truth is he was all of these things.

Kehoe’s life story is a series of remnants vaguely documented and filtered through the horror of his crimes. His father, Philip Kehoe, was an Irish Catholic immigrant, one of many who left the Emerald Isle in the wake of the 1840s potato famine. Upon arriving in the United States, Philip, his six brothers, and their parents settled in Maryland. When expansion seized the American consciousness, Philip was one of many immigrants
who joined the native-born looking to the country’s western lands. He headed to the growing Michigan Territory and bought some farmland near Tecumseh, one of the first three settlements in the territory,
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located just north of the Michigan-Ohio border. The region was largely populated by farmers.