Jackson County’s new Endeavor Convention Center officially opened this year and has recently hosted its first events. Community members hope the center will represent a way forward in a place that’s long been linked to tragedy.
The center is located within a 1,200-acre park built on the site of the former Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, "Which has been rebranded into Endeavor Park to be indicative of stepping into a new future—a new endeavor," says Tourism Development Council Director Kelsi Jackson.
It’s been years in the making.
Plans for the Endeavor Convention Center started in 2004 when the county commission began setting aside money from a tourist development tax to use for the center. Then, 20 years later, the state allocated $1.5 million to Jackson County to help push the project over the finish line.
The convention center now stands in the Dozier school’s former gymnasium. The park also includes the Jackson County Endeavor Museum, in Dozier's former cafeteria, and NextStep at Endeavor Academy, which focuses on teaching people with Autism job and life skills. Nearby, Stillwater Ministries supports women who are struggling with addiction or who have faced abuse or housing insecurity.
Jackson says the various groups in the park plan to work together. For example, she says, participants at Endeavor Academy and Stillwater Ministries will be hired to work at the convention center.
"They are helping, not only to rehabilitate them, but get them to enter the workforce as well, so part of their program requirements are that they obtain employment," Jackson says.
The county is also working to acknowledge the past of the space the park now occupies.
After a history of abuse and neglect, Dozier School for Boys was closed in 2011. The state returned the land to the county in late 2018. Over the decades while the school was open, children there faced horrific physical, sexual and mental abuse. Nearly 100 boys died at the school. Many of their bodies are buried in unmarked graves on the grounds. In addition to efforts by the state to erect a monument memorializing those who died and suffered there, Kelsi Jackson with the Jackson County Tourist Development Council says the county wants to create a walking trail where visitors can learn more about the history of the Dozier school.