Covada, Washington — One of Ferry County's Mining Names That Survived

Covada belongs to the mineral country of Ferry County, where prospectors once named creeks, camps and settlements almost as quickly as they could stake claims.

Mining drew people into the mountains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some camps exploded briefly and disappeared; others acquired enough permanence for the name to remain after the ore no longer supported a crowd.

Covada landed somewhere in between. It never became another Republic, and the boom-era population faded dramatically.

A small inhabited locality survived, making Covada a particularly western kind of place: the mining rush is gone, most of the town that rush imagined never materialized, but the name and a few households refused to leave with the prospectors.