(Reuters) - Southern Michigan on Saturday afternoon was shaken by a mild, 4.2 magnitude earthquake, a rarity in a state more accustomed to snow storms and tornadoes, officials said.

There were no injuries and one unconfirmed report of a building suffering damage, said Michigan State Police spokesman Ron Leix.

"It rattled a lot of buildings and it surprised a lot of people," he said. "We do get these once in a while."

The quake hit at 12:23 p.m. local time and was centered 5 miles south of Galesburg and about 9 miles southeast of Kalamazoo.

Other reported damage was items falling off shelves and walls, according to the National Weather Service.

Leix said he had not heard that anything unnatural, such as underground drilling, caused the quake. Most earthquakes in North America east of the Rocky Mountains occur as faulting within bedrock, usually miles deep, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The NWS said the state's strongest earthquake was a magnitude 4.6 in far southern Michigan on Aug. 9, 1947.

(Reporting by Mary Wisniewski in Chicago and Serena Maria Daniels in Detroit; editing by Matthew Lewis)