Bicentennial
Reprinted from Inside Northside, February-March 2002 by Ann Gilbert Walk up the wooden steps at H. J. Smith’s Sons Hardware store on Columbia Street in Covington and meet the fifth generation of Smiths to work in the business, founded in 1875. In his museum next to the hardware store, “Red” Smith will show you 1910 receipts for wagon wheels and farm implements delivered by schooners, which docked at the foot of Columbia Street. Former Covington City Council woman Pat Clanton calls the Columbia Street Landing the “birthplace of the city.” When the Bogue Falaya River became polluted, the path to the landing became overgrown and forgotten. Clanton worked to reclaim this part of the city’s history, and it is now the site of many public gatherings. Everywhere you turn in Covington, you bump into history. The Ox-Lots
Mayor Keith Villere notes that Covington is on the National Register of Historic Places not because of its architecture, but because of
a unique characteristic of its mid-town layout, the ox-lots. Each block in mid-town has an open center that can be reached by an alley from two streets. “These lots were more French in origin than English. The English had one
Covington: Living History huge square in the village, not open areas in the center of each block. The original use was not to stable oxen. That came later,” he says. In recent years, the city went to court to reclaim the ox-lots as city property because businesses were encroaching on them. Sunnybrook Andrew Jackson’s camp
In 1814, on his way to meet the British, Andrew Jackson passed through Wharton, as Covington was then known. His overland route took him from Mobile to Madisonville, where his troops boarded a mail packet run by William Collins, brother of the founder of Covington. It is believed that Jackson traveled Co vi n gt o n B i c e n t e n n i a l 37