Tunnell-West House

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

From the record

“The Tunnell-West House is a historic house at 39 Central Avenue in Ocean View, Delaware. The wood-frame house was built sometime between 1868 and 1890, and is a distinctive local example of vernacular Gothic Revival style.”
Wikipedia article Tunnell-West House, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 136 National Register listings published here for Sussex County · listed in 2012 · 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 1 building as contributing to the listing.
Listed as. Tunnell--West House - the National Register files a house under its owner's surname.
Address. 39 Central Ave., Ocean View, 19970
When was it listed? July 2012
Category. building
Census division. Selbyville-Frankford
National Register reference number. 12000379 - 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.

Storms near this property

13 since 1998

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Ocean View, the town this property stands in, in 13 storm reports between 1998 and 2025: 6 lightning, 3 thunderstorm wind, 3 flash flood, 1 funnel cloud. The reports record 1 injury. 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
September 1998	Lightning	Ocean View	1 hurt	no account filed
August 2003	Lightning	Ocean View	$100,000	no account filed
August 2012	Lightning	Ocean View	$50,000	A lightning strike and ensuing fire caused extensive damage to a home on Inlet View Court in Bethany Beach. No injuries were reported.
May 2009	Lightning	Ocean View	$40,000	A lightning strike and ensuing fire sparked a garage and house fire on Oyster Shell Cove in Salt Pond in Baltimore Hundred. The garage was struck by lightning and the fire then spread to the home. Damage was estimated at $40,000. No injuries were reported.
July 2025	Flash Flood	Ocean View	-	Flash flooding occurred along portions of SR 1 Coastal Hwy.
June 2021	Lightning	Ocean View	-	An outbuilding fire due to a lightning strike was reported on Oakwood Rd. Time estimated from dispatch calls.
June 2021	Lightning	Ocean View	-	Fire departments responded to a structure fire due to lightning on Oakwood Rd. Time estimated from dispatch calls.
July 2021	Funnel Cloud	Ocean View	-	A funnel cloud was reported north of Bethany Beach. This was likely the same funnel which would become a waterspout offshore, but there was no confirmation it ever touched down over land.
April 2019	Thunderstorm Wind	Ocean View	-	A mesonet site at Indian River Inlet measured a 50 knot wind gust.
May 2019	Thunderstorm Wind	Ocean View	-	Several trees down in the Millville and Pcean View Area. Time estimated from radar.
August 2013	Flash Flood	Ocean View	-	Thunderstorms with heavy downpours caused flash flooding of small streams, fields as well as poor drainage flooding in southeastern Sussex County. Event precipitation totals included 4.13 inches in Bethany Beach, 3.80 inches in Selbyville and 3.50 inches in Gumboro.
August 2008	Flash Flood	Ocean View	-	Thunderstorms with heavy downpours caused the flooding of Delaware State Route 1 on the south end of the Indian River Inlet Bridge. Other stream and poor drainage flooding occurred in Indian River Hundred and Lewes and Rehoboth Hundred. Doppler Radar storm total estimates reached between 3 and 6 inches across east central Sussex County with the highest estimates along the border between Indian River and Lewes and Rehoboth Hundreds.
August 2007	Thunderstorm Wind	Ocean View	-	A severe thunderstorm knocked down several trees in Ocean View.

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
Evans-West House	0.2 miles	2015
Evans-West House	0.2 miles	2015
Dinker-Irvin Cottage	1.8 miles	2017
Spring Banke	2.8 miles	1976
Union Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church Complex	3.1 miles	2014
Blackwater Presbyterian Church	3.9 miles	1976

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 12000379 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.
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.