Shotgun Houses in Cairo

This summer, two students in the School of Architecture at SIUC spent the summer working on the restoration of a shotgun house in Cairo, Illinois. The students earned college credit in ARC 434: Historic Preservation this summer. Historic preservation is a course offered for several years by the SIUC School of Architecture.

The image above shows a shot of the house the students worked on this summer. A shotgun house is so named because it said that you could stand at the front door and shoot a shotgun out the back door without hitting anything the house. The front and rear doors as well as openings from room to room inside the house all align. This house type migrated up the Mississippi Delta from New Orleans throughout the 1800s and 1900s.

The students and sponsor Robert H. Swenson, along with some others, are interviewed in the video available at Flash River Safari.