Shotgun Houses - Freedmans Town or now Fourth Ward

One of my big interests in Houston is it's history and its architecture. I must admit I haven't been a big one for either, however the lack of zoning laws in Houston make for my interest to have been ignited.

In my drives and bike rides around town I noticed a lot of abandoned buildings and homes. I also noticed tiny little homes that were also abandoned or still accommodating families. What where they, how come they where so tiny, how come they where situated in particular areas of Houston, and why did they look so old.

So I read. And read a little more. Jas had already told me they where called Shotgun houses. Which meant that if you opened the front door and the back door, you could fire a shotgun and it wouldn't hit anything on the way through. It was also used to cool the house down with both doors opened and the breeze blowing through the whole house.For a state and a country obsessed with guns I found this rather funny. But looking at the plans for one of these homes I understood a little better what it might look like inside.

Shotgun houses have been around in Haiti, Dominican Republic and West Africa as early as the 1800's. In the USA and particularly Houston - Fourth Ward it was more so around the late 1800's. 

In 1866 the Fourth Ward was known as Freedman Town, a suburb where recently freed slaves who had departed the Brazos River cotton plantations settled. Here on Buffalo Bayous shores, small shanty houses where built.

The 1,000 freed slaves who settled the area chose this land, as it was inexpensive and because White Americans did not want to settle on the land, which was swampy and prone to flooding. The settlers of Freedmen's Town paved the streets with bricks that they hand-made themselves. They are still present today..little tiny red bricks that look very similar to mud bricks.


Shotgun houses where unique in that they were built very close to each other, they had only 3 bedrooms, where very close to the road and had a front porch. The front porch gave the space to welcome neighbors and family, and install a sense of community. It also gave adults the chance to watch their children and ensure safety when the streets where the only viable area that they could play. America did not have "southern" porches on their homes prior to this, and so the tradition began..


I tried to imagine what it would be like 150 years ago when families and individuals left plantations and slavery, entered this area, built their homes, paved the roads, and begun to build a community. An area that is known as one of Houston's oldest most important black neighborhoods, housed the first black churches, schools and political organisations as well as the first black hospital. This was an area so steeped in history and poignant to the free men, women and children that looking at these homes I could only cry... Oh the stories these walls could tell..

“YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF living in a shotgun shack,” begins The Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” David’s Byrne’s haunting vocals leaving little doubt as to what such a life portends. This is a place where you never want to find yourself.

For most of its history, shotgun shacks—or, less pejoratively, shotgun houses—have been totems of extreme poverty, especially in the south, where they are most common. The typical shotgun is a narrow, one-room-wide cottage with rooms lined up one behind the other and doors at the front and back. (One theory holds that the name came from the possibility of firing a gun through the front door and sending a bullet out the back.) Up to four were typically crammed onto a single lot, giving them a distinctive “row house” look, although the homes shared no common walls.

“Generally, they’re thought of in very disparaging ways,” 

“The prevailing attitude about shotgun houses is that they were slum housing".