West Woods Methodist Episcopal Church

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

From the record

“West Woods Methodist Episcopal Church is a historic Methodist Episcopal church located at Gumboro, Sussex County, Delaware. It was built in 1891, and is in the Gothic Revival style.”
Wikipedia article West Woods Methodist Episcopal Church, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 136 National Register listings published here for Sussex County · listed in 2007 · category: Building.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

What is counted as historic. The nomination lists 2 buildingss as contributing to the listing.
Address. West Woods Rd., W of Millsboro Hwy., Gumboro, 19966
When was it listed? July 2007
Category. building
Census division. Laurel-Delmar
National Register reference number. 07000246 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

Fires near this property

7 since 2005

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 7 fires within 5 miles of West Woods Methodist Episcopal Church between 2005 and 2019, burning about 193 acres in total. 1 started naturally. None was recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Missing data/not specified/undetermined	3
Debris and open burning	2
Equipment and vehicle use	1
Natural	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
9 July 2010	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	under an acre	Maryland Department of Natural Resources Forest Service	not named
6 July 2010	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	18 acres	Maryland Department of Natural Resources Forest Service	NEW HOPE RD
19 July 2012	Natural	2.0 acres	Delaware Forest Service	not named
27 June 2013	Equipment and vehicle use	12 acres	Delaware Forest Service	not named
13 April 2005	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	160 acres	Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge	MILLSBORO FIRE
24 March 2017	Debris and open burning	under an acre	Delaware Forest Service	GUMBORO
28 February 2019	Debris and open burning	under an acre	Maryland Department of Natural Resources Forest Service	not named

Every fire recorded in Sussex County

Storms near this property

16 since 1994

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Gumboro, the town this property stands in, in 16 storm reports between 1994 and 2020: 6 thunderstorm wind, 6 heavy rain, 3 lightning, 1 flash flood. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
May 2010	Lightning	Gumboro	$5,000	A lightning strike caused a structural fire in Gumboro.
March 2008	Thunderstorm Wind	Gumboro	$5,000	A line of severe thunderstorms produced wind damage from Gumboro north through Georgetown and Milton. Wires were knocked down in Gumboro. A wind gust to 63 mph was measured at the Sussex County Airport near Georgetown. A hangar was damaged at the airport. Trees fell onto a roadway in Millsboro and poles were leaning with wires down in Milton.
July 2011	Lightning	Gumboro	$1,000	Lightning struck a home in Gumboro.
August 2020	Thunderstorm Wind	Gumboro	-	Wires were downed near Gumboro. Time estimated from radar.
September 2016	Heavy Rain	Gumboro	-	Four and a quarter inches of rain fell.
September 2016	Heavy Rain	Gumboro	-	Just under four and a half inches of rain fell.
September 2016	Heavy Rain	Gumboro	-	Four and a half inches of rain fell.
September 2016	Heavy Rain	Gumboro	-	Almost five inches of rain fell.
September 2016	Heavy Rain	Gumboro	-	Just under five inches of rain fell.
September 2016	Heavy Rain	Gumboro	-	Four and a quarter inches of rain fell.
July 2008	Flash Flood	Gumboro	-	Slow moving and repeating thunderstorms with heavy rain caused poor drainage, field and flooding of smaller streams in and around Dagsboro Hundred. Doppler Radar storm total estimates reached between 6 and 7 inches within Dagsboro.
June 1994	Thunderstorm Wind	Gumboro	-	A 300 foot long chicken house holding 15,000 young birds was destroyed by the high winds. Many trees around the area were uprooted.
June 2002	Thunderstorm Wind	Gumboro	-	no account filed
August 2001	Lightning	Gumboro	-	no account filed
July 1999	Thunderstorm Wind	Gumboro	-	no account filed
March 1997	Thunderstorm Wind	Gumboro	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in Sussex County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Listed places nearby

6 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Property	Distance	Listed
Carey's Camp Meeting Ground	3.5 miles	1973
Ross Point School	5.7 miles	2001
Godwin School	6.5 miles	2018
Perry-Shockley House	6.8 miles	1985
Warren's Mill	6.9 miles	1978
Moore Potato House	7.1 miles	1990

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 07000246 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Sussex County	All 136 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.