CITY OF OXFORD

Covington Square has always been home for city’s businesses, government

By TOM SPIGOLON

tspigolon@covnews.com

Established in the early 1820s, The Covington Square, once dubbed “Newtonboro” is among the oldest settled parts of the city of Covington and Newton County as a whole.

It’s development paved the way for Covington’s foundation, and even to this day, some of the spirit that accompanied its founding still can be felt in modern day life.

The clerk of the Inferior Court paid surveyors to mark off lots of the new town, Newtonboro in June 1822. The Georgia General Assembly incorporated the town of Covington on Dec. 8, 1822, and Newtonsboro ceased to exist.

From there, the young city began to establish quickly. A brick courthouse and jail were built in 1824 to rave reviews by visitors in letters home.

By 1854, the courthouse that stood in the city’s square was outgrown. The Inferior Court ordered it moved to the street between “the Hotel and J.S. Anderson’s store house leaving an (alley) of equal width on each side …”

The “Hotel” was the Flowers Hotel, which was one of the best known of many that operated in Covington at the time and operated at the corner of Clark and Hendricks streets where BB&T Bank now stands.

J.S. Anderson’s store later became a saloon that was the source of an 1883 fire, and, later, the longtime location of the Bank of Covington. Current residents now know it to be the Mystic Grill restaurant.

What we now know as First Covington United Methodist Church was a Confederate hospital during the Civil War years of 1861 to 1865. Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea — a military campaign of the American Civil War — came through Covington in July 1864. Yankee soldiers burned the train depot, a recently completed large hospital and 2,000 bales of cotton, among other things.

On New Year’s Eve of 1883, years after the war had concluded, the Square endured another destructive shift when a fire started in the R.W. Bagby saloon on the Square’s north side.

Many of the buildings on the Square were wooden, and seven ultimately were destroyed or damaged, including the brick courthouse, its wooden roof and cornice bringing the blaze into the building.

What we see today on Clark Street on the north side of the Square is the reconstructed courthouse which was rebuilt in August 1884. A cornerstone was laid and filled with letters, copies of newspapers, Confederate money and a piece of a rope used to hang a criminal only days earlier.

When the Newton County Historical Society removed the stone on the 100th anniversary of the building in 1984, all but some coins and a belt buckle had been reduced to dust.

The Covington and Oxford Street Railroad began operating in July 1888 which brought much growth to the city. Mules pulled the cars on tracks between the Square and the railroad depot along what was then called Railroad Street (Emory Street today), and was timed to meet all