Your average shotgun shack (1) is only as wide as the single room it spans, but as long as all the rooms it consecutively contains. If you’d be so inclined, and if your aim was straight enough, you could fire a shotgun through the entirety of the house and have the bullet exit through the back door without hitting anything. That story might say more about relaxed local attitudes towards the use of firearms in a domestic setting than about anything else.

For another theory holds that ’shotgun’ in this case is a folk-etymological derivative from to-gun, an African type of longhouse that made it to the South  (and especially New Orleans) by way of Haiti. Another origin story, explaining the popularity and peculiarity of the shotgun house, at least in New Orleans, is that it derived from a local tax on lot frontage. Such a tax, payable pro rata to the street-side width of a property, would have encouraged taxpayers to creative narrow-mindedness when building their house (2).

Whatever the story, and there are one or two more (3), it’s hard not to note the similarity between the shotgun shack and the riverside strips of land on this 1858 map - long, with narrow access to the river itself. Is it a coincidence that this map details the Mississippi’s frontage from Baton Rouge south to New Orleans, in the heart of shotgun shack country? What exactly, if any, is the link between that particular type of housing and these shotgun tracts on the banks of the Big Muddy?

Quite possibly: the area’s French colonial heritage. Compare with the seigniorial system, introduced in Canada in 1627. As the St Lawrence River was the highway of the new-founded colony of New France (present-day Quebec), it made sense for the authorities to treat her busy banks as highly valuable real estate. The riverbanks were divided into narrow strips of land, each called a seigneurie (4).  This frontage system survived the British takeover of Canada by at least a century; to this day, the so-called long lots determine much of riverine Quebec’s geography.

Similar considerations were at work on the banks of that other great river highway in that other French possession in North America, the Mississippi in Louisiana. Since the shape of these long lots is intimately linked to their value, and hence their taxability, it requires no great leap of the imagination to presume that such a frontage tax could be transposed from the banks of a busy river to the sides of a busy street.

All that’s just as may be. Any precise information on the origin of and the connection between shotgun tracts and shotgun shacks is most welcome. But, also, for the purpose of this blog, of secondary importance. The main attraction of this map is not the mystery of the tracts’ origins, but their combination into a thing of weird beauty.