The Pestalozzi Froebel House was founded in 1881 by Froebel's grand-niece, Henriette Schrader-Breymann. Within it, attempts were made to reproduce the social relations and the educative community that were thought to have existed in the kind of pre-industrial rural family which had been idealized by Pestalozzi and Froebel. In addition to a training department, there was begun a public kindergarten, an intermediate class, an elementary class, a manual trade school for children up to the age of fourteen and a cookery school. Among the courses available was one on infant care, another in domestic work and evening classes for mothers. This welfare focus of the Pestalozzi-Froebel House blurred the boundaries between teaching and social work and produced a socially oriented pedagogy. The paper discusses the pedagogic strategies intended to rescue the children of the urban poor and the reformation of their families adopted by the Pestalozzi Froebel House. It also examines the spread of its revisionist Froebelianism by considering its presence at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 and its emulation by organizations and kindergartens in London and Birmingham, The data for the paper are drawn from extensive archival research and contemporary literature.