Old roads that crisscrossed western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina carried stage traffic almost daily. Also, the old turnpike between Asheville and Greenville was a much-traveled stagecoach road. Stagecoach travel was anything but easy on the rough and rocky roads in the 1800s, which were little more than pig paths. David, a Greenville journalist from the early twentieth century, spoke often in his newspaper columns about the old days of stagecoach travel. The horn served as a signal to the old stagecoach inns that the coach was soon arriving with passengers who needed to be fed and lodged.