his wife Dorothy died. Charles pere et fils went into the boot and shoe business under the name C. A. Spring & Sons, locating at 188 Lake St. They lived in Hyde Park for a time, but by 1855 were in West Chicago, living on Fulton between Union and Halsted. By 1858, Charles took to farming again in Manteno, just south of Chicago. Relationship with Cyrus McCormick and church work While in Chicago, Charles Sr. became superintendent of the Sunday school at the North Presbyterian Church, and there met the inventor Cyrus Hall McCormick, whose mechanized reaper did for the Midwest what the cotton gin had done for the South. The two remained close friends and kept up an extensive correspondence until McCormick's death in 1884. Spring and McCormick established the South Church in what is now The Loop in Chicago, although they returned to the North Church when they were able to retain their favoured pastor, Rev. Dr. Nathan Rice. During the 1850s, Charles was instrumental in the founding of what eventually became the McCormick Theological Seminary. McCormick was a conservative Democrat who had been born in Virginia, and although he was no apologist for slavery, was intent on holding together both the Old School Presbyterian Church and the Union (he considered the Presbyterian Church and the Democratic Party to be the “two hoops that hold the barrel of the Union together." McCormick thus set his sights on securing a seminary which would advance orthodox Presybyterian doctrine. An Indiana seminary was in dire straits, and when the General Assembly met in Indianapolis in 1859 to discuss its future, McCormick, acting through Spring (who was a delegate), offered the seminary an endowment of $100,000 on the condition that the Seminary locate in Chicago and that the General Assembly take control of it from the synods. This was an offer that the General Assembly couldn't refuse, and so the Seminary found its new home in Chicago. Charles A. Spring was also instrumental in gaining the donation of some of the land for the seminary, from the brewers Lill & Diversey. He sat on the Seminary's Board of Directors from 1859 to 1876 (when he relocated to Western Iowa). In an 1872 letter, McCormick gave his friend Spring the credit for the founding of the seminary, referring to Spring as “the most aged and experienced of us all, and to whom I