For homesteaders, the bumpy 15-mile wagon trip to Conway took 3 hours on a good day, so trips to the store were chances to stock up on supplies such as 50-pound sacks of grain or seed, cloth for the whole family’s clothes, and to send and receive mail. The stage was the community’s link with the outside world, bringing isolated hill farmers newspapers, making purchases for them in town, and even doing their banking. Families could avoid the 3-hour shopping trip to Conway after Amzi and Eliza Russell began selling supplies at their farm, and tourists also used the stage to reach the Valley until the 1920s. The men who drove the stages were often colorful characters who also owned a farm or an inn; Jim Shackford of Shackford’s Passaconaway House Inn was typical, known as a good storyteller, a skilled driver, and someone able to quickly fix a wheel broken by the rutted road or a frost-heaved stone. As an 1892 map shows, this road was once lined with farms, and today clues to that vanished community remain in old cellar holes, cemeteries, old hotel sites, and stonewalls scattered through the Forest.