After railroad service began between New York City and Toms River in 1866, wealthy visitors from northern urban areas increasingly came for summer stays on the river, bay, and ocean, and some became year-round residents who built vacation houses along the bluff overlooking the river. Rebecca Finn, a seasonal visitor, built the Stoutenburgh-Minturn House in 1868, a vernacular Victorian Gothic house whose style reflected the tastes of affluent residents building vacation homes in Toms River in the late 1800s. She also had a modest mission church built on her property for local Irish Catholics in the 1870s, including railroad workers and women employed as cooks and maids for wealthy sea captains, and the growing congregation later moved to a larger building on Hooper Avenue. The house later became the residence of John H. Stoutenburgh, founder and longtime commodore of the Toms River Yacht Club, and was then bought in 1924 by James F. Minturn, a New Jersey Supreme Court justice; it is no longer occupied as a residence but is still used for business purposes. Nearby, Elisha Walton built the William House in 1859, the oldest remaining house east of Hooper Avenue that retains its original Victorian architectural features; Frank Williams, a Philadelphia machinist who bought it in 1887 after moving to Toms River for health reasons, helped build some of the first boat engines at Faunce's Boat Works and also built engines at Kirk Boat Works, and the restored house has likewise been adapted for business use. The Joseph Francis Carriage House, built about 1868, is the only surviving structure of the estate of Joseph Francis, inventor of the corrugated metal Lifecar, which was credited with saving more than 2,500 lives by the mid-1800s and contributed to the development of the United States Life-Saving Service. Francis received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor from President Benjamin Harrison in 1890 for his maritime inventions and improvements. After Ringland Kilpatrick bought the property in 1903 and kept his coach Tally-Ho in the carriage house, Britton Cook acquired it five years later and transformed the estate into the Riverview Hotel and Restaurant, but a 1964 fire destroyed the nearly one-hundred-year-old main building, leaving the carriage house as the last remnant of the Francis estate.