Leaving Le Mars

In 1896 the twenty-five-year-old family business was barely scraping by and the brothers decided to liquidate while assets still covered liabilities.  Then in 1901 George lost his year-long struggle with diabetes-related illness.  Both events likely figured in Winthop and Ellen's decision between 1900 and 1901 to leave the small town of Le Mars and return to Chicago.  They had married there nearly four decades earlier and Winthrop's business career began there. 

The relocation probably helped close the chapter on nearly fifty years of struggling with retail business begun with their father's shoe store in the 1850s.  Also, with Winthrop in his mid seventies and a decade older than Ellen, and perhaps humbled by the deaths of two of his brothers,* he may have wanted to see his wife and daughter settled closer to his sons.  There may have been financial reasons for the move as well.  When Spring Bros failed it was reported that supplier accounts were paid up and liquidated assets were expected to pay off a $4,600 obligation to the First National Bank in La Mars.  In Chicago Winthrop and Ellen moved in with their middle son, Winthrop Jr., suggesting that honoring business obligations at the Le Mars store may have depleted Winthrop's financial resources.

All three boys – Charles (1864-1919), Winthrop Jr. (1871-1923), nicknamed "Wint," and Samuel (1875-1952) – had families.  Charles and Winthrop Jr. lived in Chicago and Samuel in New Haven, Connecticut.  Winthrop and Ellen's only daughter, Edwina, named after one of Winthrop's sisters, lived with her parents and made the move with them to Chicago.

Matinee excursion to the Iroquois

On Wednesday afternoon December 30, 1903 four Spring family members perished while attending a matinee of Klaw and Erlanger's production of the Mr. Bluebeard fairy tale at Chicago's newest playhouse, the Iroquois Theater.  The victims: Winthrop, Ellen, Edwina and Winthrop Jr's wife, Florence.  It is not known if Winthrop Jr. also attended the theater and escaped.  As a traveling salesman he may have been on the road.

Winthrop and Ellen's youngest son, Samuel, married to Adah Bowman and living in Connecticut, identified the bodies of his parents and sister.  It is not known if he and his wife were in Chicago for the holidays or if he traveled to Chicago upon hearing his family was feared lost in the disaster.  Their son, Ernest, was only six months old so it seems most likely that Samuel made the trip to Chicago after the fire. 

It seems odd that Charles and Winthrop Jr. did not make the identifications of their parents, sister and wife but both were traveling salesmen and may have been on the road, trying to get back to Chicago.  Robert Gilmore, of unknown relationship to the family, identified Florence's body.

It is not known where the Spring party was seated at the theater, or details of their funeral arrangements.  All that was reported was that there were three hearses in the funeral procession, so either one hearse carried two caskets or there were two bodies in one casket.  Winthrop was probably tall, as had been his grandfather and as were his sons.  All four of the Spring family Iroquois victims were buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago. 

Relatives were associated with the Presbyterian and Congregational faiths.  One of Winthrop's brothers, Charles, was Presbyterian and another, George, was a deacon in the Congregational church in Le Mars.† 

At the time of their deaths Winthrop Sr, Ellen and Edwina lived at 420 Foster Avenue with their son, Winthrop Jr., his wife, Florence, and Wint's preschool daughter, Marjorie.  Charles and his wife, Carrie Cavanaugh Spring, lived at 657 Pine Grove. 

The victims

Seventy-five-year-old Winthrop N. Spring Sr (b. 1828) was one of the oldest Iroquois Theater victims.  He was the grandson of reverend Samuel Spring (1746-1819), chaplain in Benedict Arnold's army during the American Revolution, graduate of Princeton University and chum of Aaron Burr.  Born in Massachusetts to Charles and Dorothy Norton Spring, Winthrop married Ellen in 1862.  By 1903 he was done with retail once and for all, enjoying his senior years.‡    

Sixty-four-year-old Ellen Newton Spring (b. 1839) was born in Vermont to George and Orella Snow Newton.  She bore five children, of which four were living as of 1900. 

Thirty-five-year-old Edwina Spring (b. 1868) was born in Illinois where the family lived before moving west to Iowa.  She graduated from the Froebel Kindergarten Association of Chicago and in 1891 opened a kindergarten class for Le Mars children age three and up in the former normal school building at the corner of Washington and Third Street.  The cost: $3/mo per child.  By 1893 she took a job as principal of a kindergarten somewhere in north Chicago but by 1900 was back living in Le Mars and teaching, presumably kindergarten.

Twenty-seven-year-old Florence May Scovell Spring (b. 1876) was born in Ontario to George and Charlotte Scovell.  She and Winthrop Spring Jr. (1871-1923) married in 1898.  At Florence's death they had one child, a three year old daughter named Marjorie Spring (1900-1972).

In the years after the fire

Samuel Spring and his family settled in New York where he became a noted professor in the forestry department at Cornell University and a correspondent of president Franklin Roosevelt. 

Winthrop Spring Jr. remarried four years after the fire, to Lulu Brown, with whom he had two children – Evelyn Edwina and Winthrop Spring III.  By the 1920s Winthrop's family joined Samuel in Connecticut where Wint worked as a sales manager at the Stratford Connecticut Brass Foundry and was a principal in the Berbecker & Rowland Mfg. Co. in Waterville, CT. 

Charles and Carrie divorced and both remarried.  He and his second wife relocated to Cincinnati.  He worked for a business liquidation company, an occupation that would have reminded him often of his family's struggling retail operations.

Seems like she should have been able to put paid to tragedy when she lost her mother at the Iroquois but for Marjorie Spring (1901-1959), Florence and Winthrop's daughter, life kept dumping to the very end.  She became a nurse and in 1932, while working in Manila, married Herald "Blondy" Booker.  A decade later, working as a civilian for the Adjutant General's Corps during World War II, Blondy was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned at Cabanatuan.  In October, 1944 he was one of over 1,800 POW's being transported to slave labor camps aboard the unmarked Arisan Maru Hell Ship, when it was struck by a U.S. torpedo and sank in the Bashi Channel of the South China Sea.  All but a handful died from drowning when the Japanese on nearby destroyers refused to rescue them from the water, using clubs to prevent them from boarding the ships.  Eight months would pass before family members were informed of the status of their loved ones.
Marjorie remarried three years later, to John Hardwick, and spent her final years living in Grants Pass, Oregon, about 135 miles south of Eugene.  In March, 1959 she died of a broken neck following an automobile crash on Lower River Road near the old Robertson Bridge over the Rogue River.  She rounded a corner to find children in the road, getting off a school bus.  To avoid hitting them she swerved and her car went down a twenty-foot embankment.  She survived for a month in the hospital before succumbing to her injuries.  Marjorie was fifty-eight at the time, employed as a case worker for the Josephine County Welfare Department.

Discrepancies and addendum

* Winthrop's older brother, Charles A. Spring, also died in 1901.  Charles was a friend and valued manager for Cyrus McCormick in Chicago, working as a superintendent for many years at the McCormick Harvesting Company.

† The women's Temperance Union also met at the Le Mars Congregational church in the 1890s.  Winthrop's and George's sister, Edwina Spring Mudge (1832-1907), and George's wife, Maria Lane Spring (1833-1910), were members of the organization.

‡ In the 1850s all three brothers, Charles, Winthop and George, together with their father, Charles A. Spring (1800-1892) operated a shoe and boot store at 188 Lake Street in Chicago named "C. A. Spring & Sons."  Charles Sr. helped found the McCormick Theological Seminary.

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