The New York House of Refuge, the first institution in America to deal with the juvenile delinquent as a special problem, opened its doors in 1825. Deeply concerned with the plight of the thousands of children who roamed the New York City streets, many of them becoming professional criminals, a volunteer group called the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, founded the institution to rehabilitate "deviant" adolescents. This is the story of the critical early years of juvenile reform, which soon became a national movement. Trial and error approaches to solving the problem were often thwarted by the founders themselves, but some methods did prove successful. The personalities of the institution's administrators and of their youthful charges come to life through diary and journal accounts kept by the leading characters in this description of one historic attempt at "taming of the deviant." The House of Refuge finally closed in 1935, replaced by other institutions.