![]() ![]() “Probably any town in which building of inexpensive houses was going on between around 1880 to 1920,” Edwards said. The design followed the rivers North and West from New Orleans, then later traveled more widely via railroad. ![]() We think of shotguns as Southern, vernacular designs-vernacular defined as structures built by ordinary people of a particular region-but according to Edwards, shotguns (or variations on the style) are found from Texas to east of the Rockies from the Midwest to the Atlantic Coast. ![]() Sears and Roebuck and the railroads had their own, non-folk versions of the shotgun. and Samuels and West, shipped house kits by barge up the Mississippi River. In the nineteenth century, New Orleans manufacturers of pre-fab shotguns, including Roberts and Co. Simple and inexpensive to build, the shotgun spread by the hands of carpenters. “These were adopted by local builders, many of whom, perhaps, had never seen an actual shotgun,” explained scholar and anthropologist Jay D. By 1910, pattern books featured the California bungalow, or Craftsman-style house, which included designs almost indistinguishable from shotguns. By 1900, local carpenters were looking at pattern books to build them. Throughout the nineteenth century, many New Orleans residents resettled in upriver cities such as Louisville and built their versions of shotguns. For some working poor, the house type afforded the chance at a decent home, even ownership, close to where the house builder made his or her living. Usually three or four rooms deep but as few as two, one behind the other, the shotgun’s front and back doors often had transom windows, which theoretically provided good air circulation via a cross-breeze (though architects argue this point). By the 1830s, the dwellings were also being utilized for factory, farm, and railroad workers. Having encountered the design in the Caribbean, the free people of color who came to New Orleans from Saint-Domingue built many shotguns for themselves and others in the early nineteenth century. Usually no more than twelve feet wide on a city lot often no more than thirty feet wide, the Louisiana shotgun increased substantially in popularity with the influx of refugees from Saint-Domingue/modern Haiti following the Haitian Revolution. The structure’s very simplicity has allowed the design to survive since its origins in West Africa, its passage through the Caribbean and to Haiti, and its ultimate landfall in New Orleans in the early 1800s. The space made it harder for fire to spread, so the thinking went, and the Spanish Cabildo (or city council) was forced to acknowledge that such wooden dwellings were necessary, as poor individuals could not afford expensive bricks and tile roofs. Building codes required wooden houses to be narrow so that there was room between the houses built on small lots. The shotgun house design thrived in New Orleans following two disastrous fires in the late eighteenth century. ![]() Scholars in the field of vernacular architecture apply scientific names to this humble structure, its origins, and its future, but the shotgun doesn’t lend itself to high church language. I’m talking, of course, about the shotgun house. In many Louisiana cities, we have only to take a walk, ride a bicycle, or embark on a short drive to see a house design simultaneously so old and so modern that the sight of it makes us smile. If you've been using KAYAK successfully up until now, try closing your browser and starting again.In a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, John Mellencamp said that he wrote “Pink Houses” driving along Interstate 65 in Indianapolis, looking out on what were likely neighborhoods of shotguns. Please send us a message and we'll try to figure out what went wrong. Probably something about the web browser you are using made KAYAK think you are a bot. They tend to try to cram large suitcases in the overhead bin, and they prattle on about celebrities they know while you are trying to watch the movie. For example, we don't want bots running about trying to book airline tickets. Bots are generally a good thing, but some web pages are for humans only. KAYAK uses bots to search for travel deals. Search engines like Google use robots to build up search results. What is a bot?Ī bot, or robot, or crawler is software that visits web sites and collects data from them without a human present. If you are seeing this page, it means that KAYAK thinks you are a "bot," and the page you were trying to get to is only useful for humans. ![]()
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