A County Seat Built in Two Eras
Richmond was founded in 1798 by Revolutionary War veteran Col. John Miller, officially named on July 4 of that year after Miller's birthplace in Virginia. Its housing stock reflects two very different growth periods since then: an old Madison County core dating back toward the town's founding, and a second wave that followed Eastern Kentucky University's founding in 1906 as a teacher-training school, later renamed EKU in 1965.
Two Building Eras, Two Crawl Space Profiles
Those two eras of construction come with two different sets of crawl space conditions. Older homes near the historic core often have shallower, harder-to-access crawl spaces with decades of built-up humidity, while the university-era housing built through the 20th century tends to have more consistent, code-influenced framing but still relies on the same crawl-space-over-basement approach used across most of Kentucky.
Project Paths
Matching the Fix to the Era
Because Richmond's housing spans from the town's earliest decades through the growth that followed EKU's founding, a crawl space evaluation should identify which era a given house belongs to before assuming what kind of vapor barrier, if any, is already down there.