Division of St. John Historic District — Downtown Covington

The layout dates to 1813: every block 360 feet square, with a second square — 120 feet on each side — carved from the center of each one. The small interior squares connected to the street grid through alleys. They were held in common. Farmers and merchants tethered oxen and livestock there, so they became known as oxlots. Of the 20 blocks in the original district, 18 still have oxlots. Nine remain largely unencroached. One is pristine. Together they represent more than nine acres of open space, confined and semi-naturalistic, inside the urban fabric — a resource that could have been eliminated but wasn't. The Division of St. John is St. Tammany Parish's largest National Register historic district, covering 100 acres and 19 city blocks of Covington, the parish seat. It sits at the confluence of the Bogue Falaya and Tchefuncte rivers — two of the streams that feed Lake Pontchartrain, the estuary that connects this shore to New Orleans and the Gulf beyond. Two major fires destroyed most buildings before 1880. What stands now came during redevelopment booms in the lumber and "ozone" resort industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The listing, added to the National Register in 1982, includes 170 contributing buildings and 77 non-contributing structures, mostly one-story and spread relatively evenly throughout the blocks. Of these, 163 date from 1881 to 1930. The Southern Hotel anchors the commercial district — a two-story brick building completed in 1911 with corner pavilions, matching balconies, fixed awnings with overhead transoms, arched windows with arched lintels, and elaborate brackets. It still operates as a boutique property on the square. Saturday mornings bring the Covington Farmers Market next to Bogue Falaya Park.