H.J. Smith & Sons General Store & Museum

The Bogue Falaya feeds into Lake Pontchartrain. H.J. Smith & Sons General Store stands one block from the river, on Columbia Street in Old Covington. The store opened in 1876 — the oldest continuously operating business in St. Tammany Parish. Only the St. Tammany Farmer newspaper, founded in 1874, has been in business longer. Pontchartrain is an estuary, not a lake. Its name is a diplomatic courtesy: Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville renamed it in 1699 for Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, French Minister of the Marine under Louis XIV. The estuary itself formed 4,000 to 2,600 years ago as the Mississippi Delta built its southern and eastern shorelines with alluvial deposits. Indigenous peoples called it Okwata — 'wide water.' It covers 630 square miles, averaging twelve to fourteen feet deep. Five rivers — the Tangipahoa, Tchefuncte, Tickfaw, Amite, and Bogue Falaya — pour fresh water into it. Salinity ranges from negligible at the northern cusp west of Mandeville to nearly half seawater at the eastern bulge near Interstate 10. The building on Columbia Street has survived every hurricane that crossed the North Shore, including Katrina. It functions as both general store and informal museum of parish commercial history. Go for the continuity — the same place, through the same storms, since Reconstruction.