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09 · American Vernacular & Regional

Shotgun House

c. 1840–1930

One room wide and several rooms deep: a narrow gabled house with a full-width front porch.

Look for

Steep gable Clapboard siding Wraparound porch
Elvis Presley Birthplace, Tupelo, Mississippi: an example of Shotgun House architecture
Elvis Presley Birthplace, Tupelo, Mississippi. Photo: Bubba73, CC BY-SA 3.0
Irish Channel Shotgun Houses, New Orleans
Irish Channel Shotgun Houses New Orleans · Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY 2.0
Old Louisville Shotgun Houses, Louisville, Kentucky
Old Louisville Shotgun Houses Louisville, Kentucky · The original uploader was Censusdata at English Wikipedia., Public domain
Freret Street Shotguns, New Orleans
Freret Street Shotguns New Orleans · Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY-SA 4.0
Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas
Project Row Houses Houston, Texas · Hourick, CC BY 3.0

what it is

A shotgun house is one room wide and three or more rooms deep, with the rooms lined up one behind another and connected by doors instead of a hallway. The narrow end, under a front-facing gable, faces the street, usually with a front porch. Variants include the double shotgun, two houses side by side sharing a central wall, and the camelback, which adds a partial second story over the rear rooms.

Large numbers survive in New Orleans neighborhoods such as Bywater, in Louisville's Germantown and Butchertown, and in Houston's Third Ward. The Elvis Presley Birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi, is a two-room shotgun house about 15 feet wide. The Creole cottage, built in New Orleans in the same period, is wider, with rooms side by side and a roof ridge parallel to the street.

how to spot one

Steep gable The triangular upper part of an end wall, framed by the two slopes of a steep roof. Steep gables are common on Gothic Revival, Tudor Revival and Queen Anne houses. Clapboard siding Long, narrow horizontal wooden boards called clapboards, each overlapping the one below, nailed over a wood frame. It is the standard wall covering of New England Colonial houses. Wraparound porch A covered porch that runs along the front of a house and continues around at least one side. It is common on Queen Anne, Folk Victorian and Colonial Revival houses.

Also look for

SpindleworkSash windowHipped roof

history

Shotgun houses were being built in New Orleans by 1832, and some sold in the 1830s may be 15 to 20 years older. Historians disagree about the origin. Architect Samuel Wilson placed it in the city's Creole suburbs in the early 1800s. Folklorist John Michael Vlach traced it through Haiti to West African house forms and linked the name to the Fon word to-gun, meaning place of assembly. A more common explanation is that a shotgun fired through the open front door would pass straight out the back. The double shotgun appeared in New Orleans by 1854.

The word first appeared in print in 1903, in an Atlanta newspaper advertisement for "good shot-gun houses." The type spread through the lower Mississippi Valley and to Key West, Texas and as far north as Chicago, and was most widely built in the South from 1865 into the 1920s. After World War II, few new ones were built. Several cities now protect them in historic districts, including Village West in Miami's Coconut Grove, where 25 have been designated historic.

where to find it

New Orleans, Louisville's Germantown, and historic Black neighborhoods across the American South.

easy to confuse with

Wesleyan Grove Cottages, an example of Folk Victorian Folk Victorian Plain folk house shapes dressed up with porch spindles and jigsaw-cut gable trim. Cahokia Courthouse, an example of French Colonial French Colonial Living floors raised a story off the ground, wrapped in full-width porches under one broad hipped roof.