Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing (34 page)

Fig. 18. Women and children removing nails from salvaged beams of the damaged building.
(Courtesy of the Bath School Museum.)

Cleanup work continued throughout the summer. It was a dirty, exhausting task, moving rubble for disposal while salvaging anything that could be used in rebuilding the school.

It was also dangerous work. Despite the hundreds of pounds of explosives removed in May, caution was paramount. No one wanted to take a chance on setting off any unexploded dynamite hidden beneath the rubble.

It was a smart move. On July 19, workers found amid the ruins a sack of dynamite and a kerosene-soaked rug. A ventilator was packed with mounds of small wood shavings, shoved inside for use as an accelerant.
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One month later another cache of explosives was discovered. The well-wrapped bundle contained 244 sticks of dynamite, more than two hundred pounds’ worth. It was carefully concealed beneath the first floor not far from the ruined north wing.
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There were no newspaper reporters on the scene when the children of Bath returned to school in the fall. For a village still in deep shock and mourning, this was a blessed relief.

With the school under repair, the children needed classrooms. The one-room schoolhouse model was not an option; children and their parents relied on a central location. The Lansing School Board generously offered “free of charge” education for the upcoming year, an offer that was eventually turned down. It was vital that Bath move forward. Although the school building was unusable for the time being, learning would continue.
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Downtown Bath became a campus of sorts. Students met on all three floors of the Community Hall where just a few months before some of their peers were laid out in a temporary morgue. Classes were held in the grocery store, drugstore, barbershop, firehouse, barns, houses, garages, and offices. With a little imagination and coordination, just about any space could be transformed into a classroom.

The annual return to school, however hodgepodge it was, represented newness, that wonderful feeling that returned every September. In Bath, the annual ritual held deeper significance. Friends were gone. Not quite 14 percent of the school population was killed on May 18.

Children who walked to school didn’t always take a direct route to their new classrooms; many took out of the way jogs to avoid the ruins of Bath Consolidated. The wounds—some physical, many psychological— needed time to heal.

Willis Cressman’s classes met in the grocery store. Getting to class was simple enough: enter the store, walk around the pickle barrels and rows of dry goods, take a seat, and begin learning. One windy day, in the middle of a lesson, the classroom door slammed shut. A loud
bang!
resounded off the walls like dynamite.

Cressman jumped out of his seat and instinctively ran for the door, pumping his legs furiously. He didn’t know how he got out of the building, but somehow he was safe on the other side of the street.

He stopped, caught his breath, turned around, and saw that the store was still intact. Cressman’s classmates swarmed the sidewalk. He realized later that when the noise of the door cracked through the air
everyone
had bolted.
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At the end of summer Josephine Cushman was sent to live with relatives in Holt, a town about twenty miles from Bath. Her parents felt it was best,
thinking that a return to school would only remind Josephine of her losses on May 18.

Every Friday Josephine took the train from Holt to Bath to stay with her parents for the weekend; every Sunday she was put on the return train back to Holt.

It didn’t sit well with her. Although she loved her cousins, Josephine wanted nothing more than to be back home permanently. She developed a terrible itch. Probably lice, the grownups deduced. A doctor checked but found no physical cause for her condition.

After six weeks of commuting back and forth, Josephine decided she’d had enough. She wasn’t sure what she would tell her parents, though she knew she had to say something.

It came out unexpectedly, catching both Josephine and her parents by surprise. “You know, I’m not going back there!” she boldly declared one Sunday. Immediately, she felt, it was the wrong thing to say, but Nellie and Albert remained silent. Josephine’s weekly trips between Holt and Bath came to a sudden end.

Still, her mother was nervous about letting Josephine return to school. It didn’t matter that classes were now held in buildings throughout the downtown area; as far as Nellie Cushman was concerned, Josephine wasn’t going back to the Bath Consolidated School.

To Josephine this was just as bad as living in Holt. The house seemed empty without Ralph. She needed to be with her classmates.

Although the setting of the Bath school had changed, its essence remained the same. There still were school parties for the children, still a sense of normalcy in the wake of destruction.

An old-fashioned wienie roast proved to be Josephine’s salvation. Gordon Hollister, who, like Josephine, was fourteen years old, asked her to be his date. With her parents’ permission, she was allowed to attend. It was exactly what she needed. Being with old friends, having the chance to be a regular teenager once more, gave her a fresh outlook on life. When Josephine came home that evening, Albert and Nellie could see the joy on their daughter’s face.

“Did you have a good time?” her mother asked.

“The best time I’ve had in a long time,” Josephine said. “It was so much fun being with all those kids.”

After Sunday dinner the next evening, Albert and Nellie sat down with their daughter. “Josephine,” Nellie said, “would you like to go back to school?”

“Oh, yes!” she said, her voice barely audible. “I would love it.”

“Okay,” said Nellie. “Get your things ready and you can go back.” Josephine felt breathless, as if a terrible burden had been lifted from her.
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The cornerstone of the new school was put in place on November 1, 1927, nearly six months after the bombing. A brief ceremony marked the occasion with Superintendent Brandt providing a few words along with Dean Phelan of Michigan State College and Mattie Smith, the county school commissioner.
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Come May 1928 commencement exercises were held as scheduled. Ten members of the class, five women and five men, posed for a picture with Superintendent Brandt. In their portrait, the graduates—most of whom had been injured, lost loved ones, or both—looked at the camera with somber expressions.
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The idea of a memorial park was scrapped, but a collective yearning for something to honor the dead remained. “Any memorial that is erected to the martyred children in Bath may reach higher than the tower of Babel, yet be diminished by contrast with the black pillar of anguish that will be in the breasts and brains of their parents when they gaze dim-eyed at man’s effort to close an incident tenderly—a tiny hillock blanketed with grass, as with a benediction,” wrote Frank Pritchard of the
Lansing State Journal.

Exactly what could be deemed a fitting tribute was a point of contention. When the parade of tourists faded, when the children went back to school, when news would again be dominated by farming and commerce, when the Community Hall was again a place for meetings and entertainment, when Bath returned to normal—or at least a shadow of normal—this memorial must be something for future generations to comprehend, a mark on the world that spoke of the unbearable grief that ensued when thirty-eight children and five adults (plus two others) were wiped out.
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On August 18, 1928, another ceremony took place, dedicating the new educational facility, renamed the James Couzens Agricultural School after its benefactor. Ultimately the rebuilding cost Senator Couzens seventy-five thousand dollars. One of the speakers was L. L. Tyler, the principal of the old Bath High School some forty years earlier and now a professor at Alma College, located fifty miles north of Lansing.

A silent greeter stood in the school’s central lobby, a bronze statue of a ten-year-old girl holding a cat under her right arm. This sculpture, created by Carleton Angell of the University of Michigan, was funded by schoolchildren throughout the state at the suggestion of Professor Tyler. Tyler had proposed that students from every school in Michigan donate a few pennies for a memorial honoring their fallen peers. It was an inspired move. Coins arrived in droves from all of Michigan’s five hundred school districts.
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(Rumors abounded through the years that the statue’s metal was copper, melted down and recast from the thousands of pennies that paid for its creation.)

The figure, titled simply “Girl with a Cat,” did not speak to the tragedy. Rather it represented all children, the face of the future, a rebirth of hope, the powerful strength of human resilience.

The Kehoe property reverted back to the Price family. Unable to face the shadow on that land, they donated the grounds to Sisters of Mercy, the Catholic order that oversaw the Saint Lawrence Hospital.

Nothing was done with the property. In the late 1930s, it was bought by Otis Van Ostran. Everyone told the new owner he was a fool for buying such tainted ground. Didn’t he know the place was a potential minefield still packed with buried dynamite? One never knew if Kehoe had planted explosives in the ground in one last effort to wreak revenge on Bath. Yet Van Ostran was determined; after all, it made no sense to let good soil go to waste.

The first time he plowed, Van Ostran later told people, he felt his heart in his throat.
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The skeletal brick traces of what was once a farmhouse remained standing throughout the seasons for years on end, crumbling, growing more silent over time.
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A powerful rainstorm struck Bath on June 1, 1943. The dark clouds grew furious, firing rain and lightning on the town. Thunder exploded like dynamite. The storm boiled over, erupting into a twister. Its winds turned barns into piles of sticks. Animals were haphazardly picked up and dropped across farmlands.
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Ava Sweet Nelson took her two children to the cellar for safety. The thunder was deafening. For a moment, it seemed like she was back in
sixth grade with piles of bricks falling around her as the explosion racked the school.

It took years for Ava’s daughter Alice to understand why her mother became hysterical during the storm.
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