The first Europeans to explore this area were attached to the noted expedition of the French Canadians Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet in 1673.

This expedition went down the Mississippi from present-day Wisconsin to the mouth of the Arkansas River, and then back upriver to Lake Michigan.

This became the primary commodity crop across the South in the 19th century, generating great wealth for many large planters.

Farmers in the eastern part of the state mostly developed small subsistence farms and held few slaves.

The war ended early in the Covington area, and Tennessee was occupied by Union forces from 1862.

Starting in the 1870s during the Reconstruction era, the state legislature supported railroad construction in the region, to improve transporting crops to market.

Following the invention of the automobile, during the 1910s and 1920s the United States began to construct more intercity paved highways in various regions of the county.

Both black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers in West Tennessee struggled with poverty as a result of lower cotton prices during the Great Depression, which added to social tensions between ethnic groups.

After an armed altercation during a July 1937 police raid on an illegal gambling site, Albert Gooden was arrested as a suspect in the death of a sheriff's deputy.

A month later, when the sheriff was secretly transporting Gooden back to Covington to stand trial, his car was stopped on an isolated road.

[8] Covington is part of the Memphis, Tennessee Metropolitan Area, and is located 42 mi (68 km) northeast of that large city.

According to the United States Census Bureau, this town has a total area of 10.3 square miles (27 km2), of which practically all of it is land.

Covington is situated on the southeastern edge of the New Madrid Seismic Zone, an area judged by geologists to have a high risk of earthquakes in the future.

The climate in this area is characterized by hot, humid summers and generally mild to cool winters.

Natural woodland and a man-made wetland provide habitat to some of the smaller local species such as turtles and birds.

The Veterans Memorial in front of the museum commemorates the soldiers from the county who lost their lives in wars.