shotgun house

Etymology

 * New Orleans architectural historian Samuel Wilson, Jr. has suggested that the term alludes to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.
 * Folklorist John Michael Vlach has suggested a corruption of a Dahomey Fon area term "to-gun", meaning "place of assembly", brought to New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves.

Noun

 * 1) A narrow shack with a door at each end, common in the Southern United States from the end of the Civil War until the 1920s.