About the Area
The Toms River area, originally inhabited by native peoples of the Lenni Lenape, was later settled by European Americans when the nation was a colony of the British empire. The original village, torched in a 1782 raid of the Revolutionary War by soldiers of that empire, was a important shipping seaport for coal and lumber to the growing American cities of New York and Philadelphia through the late 19th century. Over the past century-plus, local industries and tastes changed and today the area coated with suburban municipalities between the Barnegat Bay watershed and National Pinelands Reserve.
