Bath, Michigan


Bath is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Bath Charter Township, Clinton County in the U.S. state of Michigan. As of the 2010 census it had a population of 2,083.

Geography

The Bath CDP is situated just north of exit 92 off Interstate 69, about north of East Lansing. The community has no elected officials nor any separate governmental functions from the township and serves to generally describe the central business district of Bath Township, centered at Webster and Clark roads. The CDP has a total area of, of which is land and, or 3.35%, is water.
Bath is the home of the 2007 Class C boys basketball state champions, and, between 1982 and 2002, was the home of the sportsman TV series, Fred Trost's Practical Sportsman.

History

Bath was platted in 1864.

Bath School disaster

On May 18, 1927, in what became known as the Bath School disaster, Andrew Kehoe, a farmer and local school board member angry over losing an election for town clerk and under notice for foreclosure, killed his wife, detonated bombs in his house and farm buildings, and at the same time set off a bomb in the consolidated school. He drove to the school in a truck rigged with more explosives, which he detonated next to the school superintendent. In all, Kehoe killed 44 people, 38 of them children, and himself, in the worst school mass murder in U.S. history. Only half of the of explosives set under the school went off, probably greatly lowering the death toll. Thirty-eight of the 314 students, three teachers, the superintendent, the postmaster, and a local farmer assisting at the scene were killed. Most of the dead were students from second to sixth grade. Fifty-eight others were injured.