Haphazard is a historic house located on Pleasant Valley Road in

Owensboro Owensboro is a home rule-class city in and the county seat of Daviess County, Kentucky, United States. It is the fourth-largest city in the state by population. Owensboro is located on U.S. Route 60 and Interstate 165 about southwest of Lou ...

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to ...

. The house overlooks the

Ohio River The Ohio River is a long river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing southwesterly from western Pennsylvania to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illino ...

, and its name is probably derived from the river's

eddies In fluid dynamics, an eddy is the swirling of a fluid and the reverse current created when the fluid is in a turbulent flow regime. The moving fluid creates a space devoid of downstream-flowing fluid on the downstream side of the object. Fluid beh ...

. The property which Haphazard was built on was originally owned by

George Mason George Mason (October 7, 1792) was an American planter, politician, Founding Father, and delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787, one of the three delegates present who refused to sign the Constitution. His writings, including s ...

, a signatory to the

U.S. Constitution The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It superseded the Articles of Confederation, the nation's first constitution, in 1789. Originally comprising seven articles, it delineates the natio ...

, who was given the land in a grant surveyed in 1787. Mason's grandson

Richard Richard is a male given name. It originates, via Old French, from Frankish language, Old Frankish and is a Compound (linguistics), compound of the words descending from Proto-Germanic language, Proto-Germanic ''*rīk-'' 'ruler, leader, king' an ...

sold the property to Robert Triplett in 1822, by which point the log house forming the central portion of the home had been built. Triplett likely added the house's side wings, northern gable, and

Federal style Federal-style architecture is the name for the classicizing architecture built in the newly founded United States between 1780 and 1830, and particularly from 1785 to 1815, which was heavily based on the works of Andrea Palladio with several inn ...

interior. Triplett accomplished many local firsts, as he was Owensboro's first large real estate dealer; Daviess County's first soil conservationist, barge operator, and author; the first

distiller Distillation, or classical distillation, is the process of separating the components or substances from a liquid mixture by using selective boiling and condensation, usually inside an apparatus known as a still. Dry distillation is the heating ...

on the Ohio River in the county; and the builder of Kentucky's first railroad. In 1843, A. B. Barret purchased the house from Triplett; Barret then sold the house to William Bell the following year. Bell, the president of a local bank, likely added the house's

Greek Revival The Greek Revival was an architectural movement which began in the middle of the 18th century but which particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe and the United States and Canada, but ...

portico. . The house was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

on August 22, 1975.

References

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Kentucky Federal architecture in Kentucky Greek Revival houses in Kentucky Buildings and structures in Owensboro, Kentucky National Register of Historic Places in Daviess County, Kentucky {{DaviessCountyKY-NRHP-stub