Stephen Stills — Covington Years

Before Lake Pontchartrain got its causeway, its railroad, or its French name, the Indigenous people called it Okwata — wide water. By the time Stephen Stills arrived in Covington in the 1950s, the estuary's northern shore had become a place where military families could briefly put down roots between deployments. His family moved frequently, but he later cited New Orleans and Louisiana as his longest-lasting childhood anchor. Covington keeps no official marker. The connection lives in local lore and in the grain of the music that followed. Stills went on to shape American folk-rock through Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills & Nash. He became the first person inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice in one night. The estuary that gave him a childhood rhythm was an estuary in the strict sense — Lake Pontchartrain opens to the Gulf of Mexico through narrow passes, fed by six rivers, its salinity shifting from fresh water at the northern cusp to half-seawater near New Orleans. Walk Covington's downtown and you're walking where a boy who would later electrify folk music spent part of his boyhood. No plaque marks it. The water's still wide.