Shotgun house
（重定向自Shotgun shack）
![A modest shotgun house in New Orleans's Bayou St. John neighborhood shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Shotgun houses consist of three to five rooms in a row with no hallways and have a narrow, rectangular structure.](/Images/godic/202502/10/BayouStJohnHeartMarkTires2217.jpg")
![Shotgun house in the Fifth Ward neighborhood of Houston, Texas, 1973, as pictured in a photo by Danny Lyon.](/Images/godic/202502/10/HOUSE_IN_THE_FIFTH_WARD_OF_HOUSTON,_TEXAS._THIS_IS_ONE_OF_A_SERIES_OF_21_BLACK_AND_WHITE_PHOTOGRAPHS._THEY_DOCUMENT..._-_NARA_-_5576332218.jpg")
![Shotgun houses spaced tightly together in Louisville, Kentucky. In cities, shotguns were built close together for a variety of reasons.](/Images/godic/202502/10/Shotgun_houses_–_slight_cropped2218.jpg")
![A single shotgun in Avalon, Mississippi, was the house of Mississippi John Hurt, now a museum.](/Images/godic/202502/10/50_Mississippi_John_Hurt_Museum,_Avalon,_MS2218.jpg")
A "shotgun house" is a narrow rectangular domestic residence, usually no more than about 12 feet (3.5 m) wide, with rooms arranged one behind the other and doors at each end of the house. It was the most popular style of house in the Southern United States from the end of the American Civil War (1861–65) through the 1920s. Alternate names include "shotgun shack", "shotgun hut", "shotgun cottage", and in the case of a multihome dwelling, "shotgun apartment". A railroad apartment is somewhat similar, but instead of each room opening onto the next room, it has a side hallway from which rooms are entered (by analogy to compartments in passenger rail cars).