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Shotgun Housesby
Bob Bowman | |
A
reader called the other day with a question: “Do you know anything about shotgun
houses?”
You bet I do. I lived in three shotgun houses as a boy, once briefly
at Fastrill in Cherokee County,
again at Longstreet, Louisiana, and finally at Diboll in Angelina County.
A
shotgun house was a long, narrow house. Most were found in sawmill
or logging towns and were small enough to be lifted onto trucks or railroad
flatcars and moved from place to place to house the lumber company’s employees.
The name came from the description: “You can fire a shotgun through the front
door and it will go out the back door without hitting a thing.”
Southern
Pine Lumber Company utilized a few shotgun houses at Fastrill
, a logging camp on the Neches River, in
the late 1930s and early 1940s. When the company closed the Fastrill
camp, the shotgun houses were dispersed to other company locations including Longstreet,
Diboll and perhaps Pineland.
In Diboll, the houses were painted red and
that section of town became known as Redtown. They were usually unbearably hot
in summers.
Ruth Currie said the lumber company later built additional
shotgun houses at Redtown. At one time, some 50 houses stood there and Mrs. Currie
said the Redtown houses were considered “more or less temporary housing” until
the occupants were able to move into “a regular company house.”
When Lamon
Gossett came to Diboll, he embarked from the train and was met by his “boss man,”
who told him to walk down to Redtown, on Diboll’s east side, where he would find
a house that would be his living quarters.
In those days, the houses did
not have street addresses--just numbers. Most people, however, knew the houses
by the family names.
The shotgun houses in Redtown were eventually torn
down or moved to other parts of the community, including the Lakeview area. Some
also went to Daisetta, where Southern Pine had another logging camp.
In
2000, Levon Coffee, a former student at Diboll, came home for a friend’s funeral
and decided to locate the shotgun house where he lived as a young man. He found
that his family’s old shotgun house was one of several still standing at Lakeview.
It was personal, emotional moment for Coffee.
Shotgun houses may be coming
back. I read in a Houston newspaper
the other morning that an architect has designed a new type of shotgun house with
heating and cooling efficiencies.
I wish we had lived in one like that
when I was a kid. | |
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