Rubin Leek and the wild bush behind Rubel

A find the laboratory could not make alone

White enlisted local pickers and woodsmen to search the Pine Barrens for bushes bearing unusually large berries. They marked promising plants and guided her back after the fruiting season. The federal Historic American Landscapes Survey of Whitesbog, pages 43–44, identifies a bush found by Rube Leek as one of the best. Rutgers' New Jersey Digital Highway places his find near a cranberry bog on the White family's property. That description gives a landscape setting, not a coordinate for the original bush.

Leek's contribution was a wild selection, not a cross he bred in a greenhouse. White and USDA botanist Coville tested, propagated and crossed plants using such field finds. In 1916 White publicly credited the Pine Barrens guides whose knowledge let her relocate marked bushes in dense woods; the federal landscape study reproduces that address. The familiar story of two scientists therefore has a third, local source of expertise.

How Rube became Rubel

The selection carried Leek's name into the crop. The Pinelands Commission's naming lesson calls him Rubin Leek and says the Rubel variety was named for him. The federal landscape history and Whitesbog Preservation Trust's archival photograph record use Rube Leek. These sources do not establish whether Rube was a nickname, a preferred name or a different spelling in an earlier record, so both forms are retained here.

White's account, as transcribed in the federal landscape study, explains that Coville proposed “Rubel” as a name combining parts of Rube and Leek. The same study says Rubel was later used as a parent of many hybrids. Its field history records six rows of Rubel and four of Harding planted at Whitesbog in 1917. A bush selected in the wild and the cultivated rows propagated from it are different things; there is no evidence that a visitor can identify Leek's original plant today. HALS Whitesbog, pages 43 and 46.

What we can and cannot say about Leek

The state lesson associates Leek with Chatsworth and with the Leek family of Leektown. It provides no birth or death dates, occupation beyond the blueberry search, or first-person account from Leek. The evidence supports crediting him for finding the Rubel parent bush; it does not support reconstructing his whole life or treating every later commercial blueberry as a direct descendant. The often repeated percentage of modern berries said to descend from Rubel comes from a dated educational summary and is not presented here as a current genetic measurement. Pinelands Commission, “Pinelands People”; New Jersey Digital Highway, “The Blueberry Industry”.

Visit the experiment at Whitesbog

Begin at Whitesbog Historic Village, 120 W. Whites Bog Road, Browns Mills. The preservation trust says the grounds and trails are open from sunrise to sunset. Its Blueberry Trail connects Elizabeth White's home with a historic test field and passes wild blueberry bushes; use the trust's current map and trail directions. The walk makes Leek's role tangible: look from the cultivated field toward the neighboring bog and woods where people with practiced eyes searched for useful plants. Neither the original Rubel bush nor Leek's exact find spot is marked as a public destination. Stay on the marked public route and check the trust's visitor information before setting out.