Rubee Pearse

Rubee Jeffrey Pearse (born 1877 in Geneva, Iowa; died 1973) was a landscape architect.

Pearse earned his bachelor of science from Cornell College of Mount Vernon, Iowa in 1911 and began his career as a school teacher. He completed his master's in landscape architecture at Harvard University in 1915 and returned to his home state to found the firm of Pearse, Robinson & Sprague in Des Moines in 1915. The firm developed a specialty in planning fairgrounds and Pearse was appointed director of works for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After the fair closed, Pearse moved to Alabama where he was commissioned by developer Clyde Nelson to lay out the plat for the 750-lot Hollywood residential subdivision, now in Homewood. He opened an office in the Martin Building at 2308 4th Avenue North.

In 1931 Pearse designed the stone amphitheater, tennis courts and rose garden for Avondale Park. He became licensed as a civil engineer and worked for a number of government agencies during the Great Depression, including Alabama's Transient Bureau. He participated in park planning with the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1936 and then moved to Raleigh, North Carolina as a regional landscape architect for the Resettlement Administration. He designed another amphitheater and rose garden there.

After re-entering private practice in the late 1930s, Pearse continued to take government and institutional commissions. He served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. In the late 1940s he returned to fairgrounds design, preparing plans for more than 30 such facilities. In 1955 he submitted a patent application for a "floating fountain" which contained its own battery-powered apparatus for spraying and illuminating water.

Pearse became a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1970. He died in 1973.