Wyatt Street Shotgun House Historic District

Eight modest frame houses line the east side of the 300 block of Wyatt Street in Waxahachie, forming a district built about 1918. Seven follow the shotgun plan, a narrow house one room wide and two rooms deep, with a low hipped roof and a single-bay inset front porch. The eighth, at 308 Wyatt, is a two-room house with a gable roof that matches its neighbors in scale and materials. Shed additions have been added at the rear of some, but most of the houses have changed little since construction. The street lies in an area that has historically been Waxahachie's Black community, and the houses were built for poor Black laborers. The row is valued as a rare, cohesive reminder of lower-class Black housing in the early twentieth century, when many similar dwellings elsewhere in town were moved, demolished or remodeled beyond recognition. The shotgun form itself has roots traced to Africa and the Caribbean and was common across the South into the 1930s.