The Tunnell-West House was built around 1860 by John and Sarah Vaughn Tunnell of Muddy Neck, likely for a tenant farmer caring for their adjoining property. After John Tunnell died in 1863, the property passed to his daughter Eliza and her husband George Handy West, a ship's captain who owned The Chief. George and Eliza West gave each of their eight children a property in the village of Ocean View, and West Avenue is named after him. The park was donated to Ocean View by the family of their oldest child, John T. West. The house is arranged to represent a typical Civil War-era home with period furniture, most of it donated by local families. In 2008, the Ocean View Historical Society, now doing business as the Historic Village in Ocean View, saved the house from demolition and worked to restore the three downstairs rooms as a front parlor off Central Avenue, a central keeping room and kitchen, and a bedroom to the east. Between the house and the post office stands a restored two-seater outhouse donated by the Archut family, and just north of the house is a functioning water pump that would have been the home's sole source of water until the early 1930s.