style and the name itself may trace back to Haiti and Africa during the 18th century and earlier. Vlach claimed the name may have originated from a Dahomey Fon area term 'to-gun', which means "place of assembly". The description, probably used in New Orleans by Afro-Haitian slaves, may have been misunderstood and reinterpreted as "shotgun". Citing Vlach, James Deetz claimed archaeological support for an African origin in his dig at Parting Ways, a 1790s community of freed black slaves in Plymouth, Massachusetts; his shotgun interpretation of the extremely limited evidence – two rooms that "may or may not have been unified" – has been challenged as "premature". Vlach's theory behind the earlier African origin is tied to the history of New Orleans. In 1803 there were 1,355 free blacks in the city. By 1810 blacks outnumbered whites 10,500 to 4,500. This caused a housing boom. As many of both the builders and inhabitants were Africans by way of Haiti, Vlach maintained it was only natural they modeled the new homes after ones they left behind in their homeland. Many surviving Haitian dwellings of the period, including about 15 percent of the housing stock of Port-au-Prince, resemble the single shotgun houses of New Orleans. The shotgun house was popularized in New Orleans, and, as Fred Kniffen documented in a statewide survey of Louisiana house types in the 1930s, the greatest number are found dispersed from there in a manner that supports the diffusion theory. The style was definitely built there by 1832, though there is evidence that houses sold in the 1830s were built 15 to 20 years earlier. A simpler theory is that they are the typical one-room-deep floor plan popular in the rural south, rotated to accommodate narrow city lots. Such houses were built throughout hot urban areas in the South, since the style's length and outside doors at each end allowed for excellent airflow, while its narrow frontage increased the number of lots that could be fitted along a street, as was the case with the shotgun homes in Fazendeville, Louisiana, a historic, African American village that was ultimately razed during the 1960s as part of the creation of the Chalmette National Historical Park and Battlefield (now part of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve). This style was used so frequently that some southern cities estimate that, even today, 10% or more of their housing stock