Pierson College is a residential college at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Opened in 1933, it is named for Abraham Pierson, a founder and the first rector of the Collegiate School, the college later known as Yale. With just under 500 undergraduate members, Pierson is the largest of Yale's residential colleges by number of students. History Yale built the Pierson College buildings in the Georgian or "Georgian Revival" architectural style. These include a prominent tower, inspired by that of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. It is one of the eight original residential colleges bequeathed by Edward Harkness and designed by James Gamble Rogers. Pierson College's first master was Alan Valentine, then in 1935 international relations scholar Arnold Wolfers took over the role, one he held until 1949. Wolfers and his wife Doris made the Master's House at Pierson a center for entertaining on the campus second only to the house of the president of the university. Among those they hosted where diplomats who visited the campus. During World War II, Wolfers played a significant role in recruiting students into the intelligence services such as the OSS, and overall a disproportionate number of intelligence workers came from Pierson College. In addition to Wolfers, other Pierson fellows who did recruiting included Wallace Notestein and C. Bradford Welles. Pierson College residents who later became intelligence figures included future CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who often spent time in Wolfers' living room listening to poets such as Robert Frost that Wolfers brought in to read. Other attendees to these sessions included a future U.S. Poet Laureate, Reed Whittemore. In 2004, Yale completed a year long renovation of Pierson as part of a campaign to rehabilitate all twelve colleges. Major changes included the reconfiguration of existing suites and rooms, the move of the "Dean's" office, the addition of a new residential building, Upper Court. Most significantly, the renovation joined the basements of Pierson its adjacent and rival residential college, Davenport, giving the colleges common facilities. The courtyard was home to George Rickey's kinetic sculpture, "Two Planes Vertical—Horizontal II" for many years, but the sculpture has now been moved to the courtyard of the Yale University Art Gallery. Namesake Abraham Pierson was born in Southampton, Long Island in 1646 and was an early student at Harvard College. After many years as a Congregational minister in Newark, New Jersey, he assumed the pulpit in Killingworth, Connecticut in