What is a shotgun house? The one-room-wide house of New Orleans, its Haitian and African roots, the rooms in a row, the double and camelback, and why the name

Architecture · 4 September 2026

A shotgun house is a narrow house, one room wide and three to five rooms deep, about 3.5 m across and 15 to 20 m long, with the rooms opening one into the next in a straight line with no hallway, the doors aligned, a gable roof with the gable end facing the street, a small porch across the front, and a plinth of brick piers lifting it off the ground; it was the common house of the poorer neighbourhoods of the American South from about 1830 to 1930, and above all of New Orleans, where tens of thousands were built, and the story of its shape runs back through the free people of colour who came to New Orleans from Haiti in 1809 to the houses of the Yoruba of West Africa, as the folklorist John Michael Vlach argued in 1975. The name is usually explained by the shot that could be fired through the open front door and out the back without hitting a wall, and may be from a West African word; the double shotgun, two side by side under one roof, and the camelback, with a second storey at the rear, are its variants. Below: the plan and the shape, the origins, the name, the variants, the porch and the ornament, why it fitted the South, where they are, from Louisville to Tupelo, the losses and the revival, and the myths, with the other American houses in American house styles and the row house of the North in what is a brownstone.

The plan and the shape

The shotgun is defined by its plan: a single file of rooms, each about 3.5 by 4 m, the front room a parlor, the middle rooms bedrooms and the back room a kitchen, with the doors placed on the same side of each partition, or in the centre, so that a line runs from the front door to the back; there is no corridor, and to reach the kitchen one walks through every bedroom, which is the reason the house was cheap, cool and, for the Victorians, indecent. The gable roof runs the length of the house with its end to the street, often hipped at the front over the porch, with a chimney between the rooms serving fireplaces on both sides, or a flue for a stove; the house stands on brick piers 60 cm to a metre high, for the damp and the floods and the air beneath, with a porch or gallery across the 3.5 m of front under the roof, and a door and one window on the facade, with full-height shutters. The walls are of wood, weatherboards on a light frame, with a ceiling of 3.5 m and tall windows front and back, so that a breeze runs straight through when the doors are open, which in New Orleans was the point. Shotgun house.

The origins: Haiti, New Orleans and Africa

The shotgun does not appear in New Orleans before about 1810, and it appears after the arrival, in 1809 and 1810, of some 10,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution by way of Cuba, a third of them free people of colour and a third enslaved, who doubled the city's population; the houses of the free Black townspeople of Haiti's Port-au-Prince, of one room's width and rooms in a line with the gable to the street, are the shotgun's immediate ancestor, and they in turn descend, Vlach argued from the plans and proportions, from the houses of the Yoruba of western Nigeria, two rooms in a line of about 3 by 4 m with a porch, the "shogun" or to-gun, "place of assembly", which the enslaved Yoruba brought to Saint-Domingue in the 1700s and merged with the Arawak bohio of the island. The frame and the weatherboards are European, the gable-to-street is French colonial, the plan is African; the shotgun is the one American house type whose origin is Black, and it was built in New Orleans first by free people of colour as builders and landlords, in Faubourg Tremé and Marigny, and then by everyone, as the workers' house of the city. The theory has been argued over since 1975, some seeing the French and Native American houses of the Gulf as enough, and it is the accepted account.

The name

The usual story is that a shotgun fired through the front door would pass through every room and out the back door without touching a wall, which describes the plan and is true of most of them; the name is recorded from about 1900, in the South, and was not used by the builders. Vlach proposed that "shotgun" is a corruption of the Yoruba to-gun, the house of assembly, carried through Haiti and misheard; the Dahomean "shogun" has also been offered; neither is proved, and the shot through the door is what everyone knows. In New Orleans the house was called a "single" and the two-family version a "double", and the real-estate language of the city still uses them.

The variants

• Single shotgun. The one-file house, the original, for one family, three to five rooms.
• Double shotgun. Two shotguns side by side sharing a central wall under one roof, each with its own door and half the porch, the two-family house that is most of New Orleans's stock; many are now joined into one wide house.
• Camelback. A shotgun with a second storey over the rear one or two rooms only, the hump of the camel at the back, said to have been built to avoid a tax on two-storey fronts, which is the same myth as the saltbox's; the reason was the lot, which allowed no more front, and the roof, which could be raised at the back without changing the facade.
• Sidehall shotgun. A shotgun with a narrow corridor down one side, the Victorian answer to walking through bedrooms, on the wider lots of the 1880s.
• North shore and Creole cottage. The shotgun's neighbours: the Creole cottage is two rooms wide and two deep with the roof's eave to the street, older, of the 1700s; the two are the housing of the old city.
• Railroad flat and dogtrot. The Northern railroad apartment of rooms in a line is a cousin by plan and not by descent; the Southern dogtrot, two cabins with an open passage between, is the frontier's version of the through-draught.

The porch, the brackets and the paint

The shotgun of 1830 was plain, of cypress boards with a shed porch; the ones of 1870–1910, the great age, are Victorian, with a porch under the main roof or its own hipped roof carried on turned columns or square posts with jigsawn brackets, the "gingerbread" of the New Orleans millwork shops, a cornice with dentils, a gable with a sunburst or a window, doors with a transom of coloured glass, and full-length louvred shutters that were the air-conditioning, closed against the sun and open to the breeze; the houses were painted in the Caribbean colours the city likes, and the brackets, the cornice and the shutters in another, so that a street of shotguns is a row of painted faces 3.5 m wide. Inside, the ceilings are high, 3.5 to 4 m, the walls of plaster on lath or of boards, with a medallion for the gas light in the front room, mantels of wood or cast iron, and the "double parlor" of the front two rooms opened by folding doors for a funeral or a dance.

Why it fitted the South

• The lots. New Orleans divided its blocks into lots 30 feet wide and 120 deep, and the shotgun's 12 feet of width let two houses, a double, or a house and a passage fit on one; the rents of the 1800s were by the front foot.
• The heat. The high ceilings, the shutters, the piers and the straight run of doors from front to back made a draught through the house in a city without breeze, and the porch was where the family lived from May to October.
• The floods. The piers lifted the floor above the water of a city below sea level; the houses of the 1900s were built higher after each flood.
• The price. A shotgun of 1890 cost 500 to 800 dollars, of cypress that did not rot, from a builder who put up a dozen at a time, and it was the house a labourer, a longshoreman or a musician could rent or, with luck, own; Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden and the jazz of Storyville and Tremé came out of shotguns.
• The railroad and the mills. The shotgun went up the Mississippi and the railroads to the mill towns and mining camps of the South and the Midwest as the company house, in rows, and to Louisville, Houston, Memphis, Birmingham and Chicago's Black South Side, where it was the house of the Great Migration.

Where they are

• New Orleans. Still the shotgun city, with the largest stock in the country, in Bywater, Marigny, Tremé, the Irish Channel, Mid-City, the Seventh Ward and Uptown; the Preservation Resource Center's tours and the Historic District Landmarks Commission's rules keep them, and a restored double in Bywater is now a 600,000-dollar house.
• Louisville, Kentucky. The second shotgun city, with thousands in Portland, Germantown, Butchertown and Smoketown, built 1880–1920 for the tobacco and rail workers, mostly of brick, the only brick shotguns in numbers.
• Houston. The Fourth Ward's Freedmen's Town, the shotguns of the freed slaves' neighbourhood of the 1870s, mostly demolished, with a few saved by Project Row Houses in the Third Ward since 1993, an art project in 22 shotguns.
• Tupelo, Mississippi. The two-room shotgun of 1934 where Elvis Presley was born, built by his father for 180 dollars, a museum.
• Elsewhere. Memphis, Mobile, Charleston's "freedman's cottages", Savannah, Key West, the Florida "cracker" versions, Birmingham, Atlanta's Cabbagetown, the mill villages of the Carolinas, Cairo and Chicago, and the shotguns of the oil towns of Texas; in the Caribbean, the chattel houses of Barbados and the "gingerbread" houses of Haiti, the family.

Losses, Katrina and the revival

The shotgun was the house of the poor, and the 20th century demolished it by the thousand for highways, housing projects and parking, in Louisville's urban renewal, Houston's Fourth Ward and New Orleans's Tremé, where the Claiborne Avenue expressway of 1968 took 500; Hurricane Katrina in 2005 flooded 80 per cent of New Orleans and destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of shotguns in the Lower Ninth Ward, Gentilly and Mid-City, of which many were bulldozed and some, the raised ones, survived where the slab houses of the 1960s drowned, which was noticed. The rebuilding brought the shotgun back as the model for the city: the Make It Right houses of 2008–15, the Musicians' Village of Habitat for Humanity in the Upper Ninth Ward, and the New Urbanist "Katrina cottages" of the Gulf Coast were shotguns in plan, raised, with porches, and the type is now the "New Orleans house" of the architecture schools and the pattern books, drawn in every city that wants density without towers, and the old ones in the dry neighbourhoods are restored and expensive.

Versions and theories

• The name is from the shot through the door. The explanation everyone gives, from about 1900; the Yoruba to-gun is Vlach's hypothesis and is repeated as fact more than it deserves. Unproved either way.
• The shotgun is African. By Vlach's account, the plan descends from the Yoruba house through Haiti; the frame and boards are European and the gable-to-street is French. The African origin is the accepted one and is argued about.
• The camelback dodged a tax. No tax on storeys existed in New Orleans; the camelback kept the facade within the lot and the rules and put the extra rooms where the roof could rise.
• Shotguns have no hallways because of poverty. Because of the width and the draught, and because the hallway was a Victorian invention that the plan predates; the sidehall shotgun added one when lots allowed.
• Shotguns are New Orleans houses. New Orleans has the most and the oldest; Louisville, Houston, Memphis and the mill South have their own, and the type is Southern.
• Elvis was born in a shotgun. In a two-room shotgun in East Tupelo, on 8 January 1935, built by his father Vernon in 1934; the house is on its site with the museum around it.

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