The Stagecoach Trail was a historic route used by stagecoaches traveling between New Albany and Terre Haute, stopping here to change horses about every 15 miles and often to deliver and pick up mail. The distance between such stops was called a stage, giving stagecoaches their name. In the 1820s, Baynard Rush Hall, first professor of the Indiana Seminary, later Indiana University, portrayed the road from the Ohio River to Bloomington as a series of dark morasses crossed by streams of purer mud. The original 1824 tavern at Spring Mill provided food and lodging for travelers, and roads in Indiana often began as game trails and Indian trails before becoming roads. Travel by stagecoach was harsh, with no shock absorbers to soften the jolts from roots, rocks, and muddy quagmires. When stagecoaches passed through Spring Mill, the village was a center of commerce, but by the late 1850s nearby railroads through Mitchell had replaced stagecoaches as the main form of travel, and Spring Mill Village was no longer a town through which travelers passed.