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In the early 1870s, Winthrop and Ellen Spring moved
west to Le Mars, Iowa, a city on the western border
of Iowa with a population then of around 4,000. Most
of their children were born in Manteno, Illinois,
near Kankakee, but were raised in Le Mars. It was
there that Winthrop and his brother, George H.
Spring (1826–1901), built the Spring Bros. store on
Main Street, selling McCormick farm implements,
furniture, and hardware. 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 a diabetes-related illness. Both events likely
figured in Winthrop 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 moved 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.
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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),
a chaplain in Benedict Arnold's army during the
American Revolution, a 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. In 1893 Edwina worked as a
principal of a kindergarten somewhere in north
Chicago but by 1900 returned to teaching in Le Mars.
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).
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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 POWs 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 caseworker for the
Josephine County Welfare Department.
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