| old houses |
| click on images to enlarge |
| the story behind the photos dogtrot house |
| So...what, exactly, is a dogtrot house? |
Back in the days before air conditioning--or electricity for that matter--clever
Southerners devised a way to create breezes through their homes--even on hot,
humid summer days. They did this by building homes with a central, open
breezeway (the dogtrot) that ran through the center of the home.
On one of the days during my mid-summer photo shoot of this dogtrot house in
Conecuh Co., AL, I stood at the back of the dogtrot, facing the front of the house. I
felt a strong refreshing breeze blowing over me, despite the fact that a few steps
away from the house the air was still and sultry. It was really quite amazing.
It is not difficult to surmise the origins of the name 'dogtrot'. One can easily imagine
the family dogs flopped out in the breezeway of such a home, obliviously napping
away the hot afternoon, then rising as the sun sinks and the temperatures ease to
trot happily back and forth through the breezeway, checking out first the front yard,
then the back, then the front again to see what the family members are up to. (And if
there might be any food scraps involved in these activities.)
Back in the 1980's, in my former life as a speech therapist in southern Georgia, I
made frequent home visits. One was to a family living in a dogtrot house. When I
pulled up in the yard (in the South, it is common for more humble homes to have no
driveway, so one 'pulls up in the yard'), it was not a greeting committee of the family
dogs that came trotting out of the home's breezeway to meet me, but a trio of
chickens flying out into the front yard, cackling in loud alarm at my arrival. I suppose
that the dogtrot's breezeway has just as commonly served as 'chicken roost' as it
has 'dog trot'!
The home I visited that day had the typical dogtrot floor plan:
the left side of the house was comprised solely of a large communal bedroom; the
right side of the house was comprised of a day room with the house's only heat
source--a wood burning stove, and behind it at the rear of the house was a small
addition that served as the family's kitchen. There was no indoor plumbing, and the
family members slept on pallets on the floor in the communal bedroom. (And you
thought 'sharing the family bed' was a modern, yuppie invention!)
This style house is often incorrectly identified as a 'shotgun' house. A shotgun
house, however, is one in which the rooms are arranged in a straight line, one
behind the other, running perpendicular to the road. The story goes that the name
comes from the notion that if all the doors in the house were open, a person could
shoot a bullet straight through the house and out the back door.
There are still many dogtrot houses standing in the South, though more and more
are devolving into disrepair--and who knows how many will fall in the next
hurricane? We lost so many old homes, barns and stores in the hurricanes of
recent years. There is no historic preservation society making them their favorite
cause. So, when I see a dotrot house, I grab my camera from my back seat and
start shooting. Someone has to preserve these glorious houses that remind us that
ideas such as 'passive cooling' and 'intelligent design' are not newly discovered
notions!
Southerners devised a way to create breezes through their homes--even on hot,
humid summer days. They did this by building homes with a central, open
breezeway (the dogtrot) that ran through the center of the home.
On one of the days during my mid-summer photo shoot of this dogtrot house in
Conecuh Co., AL, I stood at the back of the dogtrot, facing the front of the house. I
felt a strong refreshing breeze blowing over me, despite the fact that a few steps
away from the house the air was still and sultry. It was really quite amazing.
It is not difficult to surmise the origins of the name 'dogtrot'. One can easily imagine
the family dogs flopped out in the breezeway of such a home, obliviously napping
away the hot afternoon, then rising as the sun sinks and the temperatures ease to
trot happily back and forth through the breezeway, checking out first the front yard,
then the back, then the front again to see what the family members are up to. (And if
there might be any food scraps involved in these activities.)
Back in the 1980's, in my former life as a speech therapist in southern Georgia, I
made frequent home visits. One was to a family living in a dogtrot house. When I
pulled up in the yard (in the South, it is common for more humble homes to have no
driveway, so one 'pulls up in the yard'), it was not a greeting committee of the family
dogs that came trotting out of the home's breezeway to meet me, but a trio of
chickens flying out into the front yard, cackling in loud alarm at my arrival. I suppose
that the dogtrot's breezeway has just as commonly served as 'chicken roost' as it
has 'dog trot'!
The home I visited that day had the typical dogtrot floor plan:
the left side of the house was comprised solely of a large communal bedroom; the
right side of the house was comprised of a day room with the house's only heat
source--a wood burning stove, and behind it at the rear of the house was a small
addition that served as the family's kitchen. There was no indoor plumbing, and the
family members slept on pallets on the floor in the communal bedroom. (And you
thought 'sharing the family bed' was a modern, yuppie invention!)
This style house is often incorrectly identified as a 'shotgun' house. A shotgun
house, however, is one in which the rooms are arranged in a straight line, one
behind the other, running perpendicular to the road. The story goes that the name
comes from the notion that if all the doors in the house were open, a person could
shoot a bullet straight through the house and out the back door.
There are still many dogtrot houses standing in the South, though more and more
are devolving into disrepair--and who knows how many will fall in the next
hurricane? We lost so many old homes, barns and stores in the hurricanes of
recent years. There is no historic preservation society making them their favorite
cause. So, when I see a dotrot house, I grab my camera from my back seat and
start shooting. Someone has to preserve these glorious houses that remind us that
ideas such as 'passive cooling' and 'intelligent design' are not newly discovered
notions!
 | |  | |  | |  | |  |
| anyone home? |
| a tenant's life |
| all grown up |
| dogtrot house |
| that wyeth thing |
| peaceful coexistence |
| come sit |
| the way things were |
| moonshine house |
| back to nature |
| storyteller |
| tenant kitchen |
| simple ways |
| only the wind |
| dogtrot house side door |
| blowin' in the wind |