Covington

Not everyone agrees where the name came from. Most historians say the town honors General Leonard Covington, a War of 1812 hero, but the local historian Steve Ellis suggests it began as a joke about the Kentucky town's whiskey. Goods came by boat up the Bogue Falaya and the Tchefuncte from the lake until the railroad arrived in 1888, and the population rose from 585 in 1870 to 1,205 in 1900 and 2,601 in 1910. Wharton, its first name, dates to 1813, when John Wharton Collins founded it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fontainebleau State Park — 11 mi
  Lakeshore park on the Northshore where Tchefuncte potters, Acolapissa and Choctaw lived, and where 153 people were enslaved at Marigny's sugar and brick plantation by 1840; the mill ruin still stands.

More markers nearby

• Walker Percy — 0.3 mi
• West Florida Republic and St. Tammany Parish — 5.4 mi
• Civil War Earthworks — 6.2 mi
• Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — 7.9 mi