The Sanders House of Plain Dealing, Both Practical and Trendy in its Time

Wow, it’s hot out lately. Thank goodness for air conditioning. It’s hard to imagine living here in the South without it. These “dog days” of summer are a good time to revisit the southern architectural style of the dogtrot house, which featured a central open corridor from the front to back of the house.  This style of house was common throughout the Southeastern United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

If you were building a house a hundred or a hundred fifty years ago, the dogtrot style was practical for its ease of construction. The breezeway in between the rooms meant that without shared walls, complicated three-way hitches were not needed. At the same time, that large walkway could be a ‘room’ cooled by cross-breezes, providing a good place to rest, eat, shell peas or visit with family, neighbors and friends. 

Your farm animals and dogs would want some of that cool shade, too. They could run from one end of the house to the other, giving this design its name, “dogtrot.” (Other names for the form are breezeway house, dog-run house, or possum-trot house.) An alternate story for the name is that it comes from the respite from the heat that the breezeway provided when “the old dog is too hot to trot.”

Either way that it got its name, this house style was “cool.” The dogtrot form allowed windows to exist on all sides of a room and could isolate the kitchen area from the living side of the house, also helping to keep things cool. In fact, though air conditioning has made this style less-necessary, its features still make it desirable for the “indoor-outdoor” living style popular today. Dogtrot plans are having somewhat of a comeback in Southern architectural trends.

An amazing example of this vernacular style that “kept up” with its fancy Victorian neighbors was a unique home built at the turn of the twentieth century, the Sanders House in the north Bossier Parish town of Plain Dealing. This house was a charmingly unusual double-dogtrot, two-story, Queen Anne style house with elaborate trim. Leon Sanders, Jr. and his brother Doyle, who both served as mayors of Plain Dealing, grew up in this home. The home was built by their grandfather, along with the labor of many others, as told in Mayor Leon Sanders’ oral history here at the History Center. 

When the house was built, the town of Plain Dealing (founded in 1890) was new yet thriving, and contained many examples of Victorian architecture. The Sanders’ unique house combined two practical dogtrot hallways on both sides of the house, while the house was embellished with the elaborate woodwork and other stylistic details of the Queen Anne and Eastlake styles, especially on the second floor. The house had long front and back porches and smaller side porches, adding to its appeal and practicality. 

The house was so unique that in the early days of the Bossier Parish Library History Center, a model of the house was commissioned for display and built by artist David Fernandez. Presently the model is at the Bossier Parish Libraries Rita Sanders Keoun Memorial Plain Dealing Branch. Mrs. Keoun, a beloved local teacher who served on the Bossier Parish Libraries Board of Control in her retirement, grew up in the house with the former Mayors Sanders and her other siblings. The model was made just in time because sadly, while in the process of remodeling, the home burned in 2002. 

Come get out of the heat and visit the Bossier Parish Libraries History Center to see more photos of Bossier Parish dogtrots and peruse our local architecture books and oral histories. You may also request worksheets and activities on dogtrots for kids who are interested in old buildings. The History Center open M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org

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Images: 

• Photo of the C. 1898 two-story double-dogtrot Sanders house of Plain Dealing, taken in 1997
• Front and side views of a model of the C. 1898 Sanders house of Plain Dealing. Model constructed by David Fernandez in 1997