The Florida Institute, renamed Florida Memorial College in 1918, was established on this site in 1879 and stood as a lighthouse of promise for generations of African Americans. After the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, when few educational opportunities existed for African Americans, Florida's Black Baptists petitioned the American Baptist Home Mission Society to create a co-educational school to educate ministers and teachers. In October 1879, the Education Board of the Bethlehem Baptist Association met in Gainesville to establish the school in Live Oak, awarded $600 for construction, hired teachers, and established a curriculum. The Rev. J.L. Fish was appointed president, Ada Fish served as a teacher, and nine trustees were appointed, including Dr. Henry Morehouse, founder of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. The Florida Institute opened in Live Oak in 1880 and offered a 40-week term costing $1 for every four weeks of attendance. By 1884, the school had grown to include ten acres, classrooms, dormitories, an office, an auditorium, and the president's residence. In the early 1920s, the General Baptist Convention moved Florida Baptist Academy, a sister school, from Jacksonville to St. Augustine, renamed it the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute, and created an immediate rival for philanthropic support. Florida Memorial College then faced low enrollment, financial limitations, and the destruction of its administration building by fire. In 1941, the General Baptist Convention voted to merge Florida Memorial College with Florida Normal and Industrial Institute into Florida Memorial University and relocate it to south Florida. The remaining buildings on this site were sold at public auction in 1948, and the proceeds helped build Suwannee County's first public hospital. Florida Memorial University is now a private, co-educational institution in Miami Gardens offering thirty undergraduate and graduate degree programs, the only historically Black college and university in south Florida, and one of the thirty-nine member institutions of the United Negro College Fund.