This short stretch of road is the last remaining local portion of two very important early Texas roads. La Bahia Road, dating from the early 1700's, was an old Spanish military road that forked southwesterly from the Old San Antonio Road west of Nacogdoches to Presídio La Bahia near Goliad, and it later served as a stagecoach road. The Coushatta Trace was an extension of the Opelousas Road, an early immigrant road into Texas from Louisiana, and took its name from a Coushatta Indian hunting trail. Used by early smugglers trying to avoid Spanish officials, the Coushatta Trace was called the Contraband Road in some early references. Its upper fork merged with La Bahia Road northeast of present-day Anderson, and the two ran together for several miles as one road, becoming part of Postal Route #1 after 1835. During the Texas Revolution, settlers fleeing eastward from the Mexican Army traveled this road in what was later called the Runaway Scrape.