After General Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington’s Continental Army at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, the war was effectively ended, but New Jersey Loyalist William Franklin, operating from British-controlled New York City, pursued revenge against Patriots who had imprisoned him, including the people of Dover Township, now Toms River Township, which he had helped establish in 1767. Franklin arranged for HMS Arrogant to sail from New York Harbor to Cranberry Inlet, and from there British soldiers and sailors in small boats entered undetected, anchored in Barnegat Bay at Coates Point near the mouth of the Toms River, and landed eighty men before dawn on Sunday, March 24, 1782; forty Loyalists joined them as they marched toward Toms River. Garret Irons, a civilian Patriot lookout at the nearby Pennsylvania Salt Works, saw them coming, ran seven miles to warn the village, and the militiamen at the blockhouse fired a signal cannon to alert the village and nearby posts. As the attackers advanced, they shot three Patriot lookouts and split into two groups. In Toms River, Lieutenant Cornelius Blanchard demanded the surrender of the blockhouse, but Captain Joshua Huddy refused despite being outnumbered nearly five to one, and the twenty-five men inside soon exhausted their limited gunpowder. In the brief attack, nine American Patriots were killed and two seriously wounded, those who escaped were hunted down and taken prisoner, the blockhouse was burned, and all but two buildings in the village were destroyed. Garret Irons and Bartholomew Applegate were captured, set adrift in a boat without oars or sails, and survived by removing boards from the boat and paddling to shore. The blockhouse had been built in 1777 on a hill overlooking the harbor to protect the village, its privateer seaport, and the nearby Pennsylvania Salt Works in Shelter Cove, about seven miles east, which produced 90 percent of the salt needed to make gunpowder and preserve meat for the Continental Army. Staffed by rotating county volunteers throughout the war, the fort stood on the hill across Water Street, north of Huddy Park near the current Town Hall, and was a nearly square wooden stockade of seven-foot palisades with ladders for entry, small swivel cannons on platforms at each corner, and inside a log barracks and a roofed cellar for gunpowder and weapons.
