The cave gained national attention in 1841 when the body of a young cigar shop worker, Mary Cecilia Rogers, washed ashore nearby, an incident that inspired Edgar Allan Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", one of the first true-crime detective novels. From the mid-to-late-1800s, thousands of glasses were sold daily for a penny each to tourists from New York, who drank the cave's water in the belief that it had therapeutic properties. The cave was closed in 1880 due to health department concerns about water quality, and it was used as a cool storage locker for a nearby eating establishment. That establishment devolved into a seedy waterfront tavern and closed in the 1930s, when the cave was filled in with concrete and dirt.