Photograph of Fenwick Island Light — Photograph by Lionsatthegate37, CC BY-SA 3.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Fenwick Island Lighthouse Station

Built in 1858. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

From the record

“Fenwick Island Lighthouse is a lighthouse in Delaware, United States, on the Delaware/Maryland state line. The structure dates back to 1858 making it the oldest lighthouse in the state of Delaware.”
Wikipedia article Fenwick Island Light, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 136 National Register listings published here for Sussex County · listed in 1979 · category: Building · built in 1858.

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 4 buildingss as contributing to the listing.
Address. Off DE 54, Fenwick Island, 19944
When was it listed? August 1979
Category. building
When was it built? 1858
National Register reference number. 79000642 - 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

3 since 2005

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 3 fires within 5 miles of Fenwick Island Lighthouse Station between 2005 and 2017, burning about 1 acre 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
Natural	1
Missing data/not specified/undetermined	1
Smoking	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
5 August 2010	Missing data/not specified/undetermined	under an acre	Maryland Department of Natural Resources Forest Service	CYGNET LANE
21 April 2005	Natural	under an acre	Maryland Department of Natural Resources Forest Service	not named
9 March 2017	Smoking	under an acre	Delaware Forest Service	WELLS FIRE

Every fire 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

4 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
Dinker-Irvin Cottage	6.0 miles	2017
Evans-West House	6.8 miles	2015
Evans-West House	6.8 miles	2015
Tunnell-West House	7.1 miles	2012

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 79000642 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.