Covert Historic District

Covert is a small farming hamlet in southeastern Seneca County, New York, where twenty-one properties line a stretch of Route 96 about eight-tenths of a mile long. Once known as Pratt's Corners, it began as a crossroads community with a tavern and general store. Settlement in the town dates to 1788, when military lots were granted to Revolutionary War veterans. Most growth came between 1810 and 1860, and the buildings show it: timber-framed, clapboard Greek Revival houses predominate, alongside Federal and Gothic Revival examples. Notable buildings include the Pratt Tavern, built before 1810, Colonel Chauncey Pratt's brick house of 1835, the 1848 Town Hall, and the Baptist church of about 1850. Wheat farming exhausted the soil by the 1850s, and the hamlet's distance from canals and railroads halted expansion. As a result, Covert kept its nineteenth-century scale, barns and open farmland, and it has no modern intrusions.