The Butterfield Overland Stagecoach mail route of 1858-1861 that ran through central Arkansas from Memphis to Fort Smith passed through Austin, Arkansas now Old Austin and onto what is now the Conway area, then onto Fort Smith. It by-passed Little Rock so to make the state capital happy a side-run or spur was made to Little Rock, then the two routes joined together again in the Conway area. The Stagecoach Road (spur to Little Rock) is the road of which you speak of and the road I described in the earlier post. The Butterfield Overland Mail Route founded by John Butterfield, a former stagecoach driver from New York was "eclipsed by the faster Pony Express in 1860, and civil war bushwhackers and hostile Indians in the west spelled an end for the company by 1861." As the railroad came through the Cabot area in 1870 and Austin moving to the railroad, thus we now have Austin and Old Austin. Some sources say Austin at one time was considered for the site of the state capital, sounds like a political dream of someone in power in the Austin area. As the village of Old Austin's size and power shrank so did the use of the Stagecoach road, only a few miles of the actual road is in use today. As you pass through different modern subdivisons southeast of Cabot today, you cross this grownup tree lined deep ditch, and people wonder what is this ditch doing out here. They don't know they've just crossed the historic Old Stagecoach Road, that thousands of confederates soldiers trudged nearly a century and a half ago to their death at Camp Nelson. And to answer your question no it did not go through Butlerville. Three main roads in this area ran north and south, Searcy road, Stagecoach road and Brownville road. There are many roads that branched off east and west of these roads. I would say one left the Brownville road east to the Sylvania/Butlerville area, one left the Hickory Plains road (the Doc Rayburne Road) going northwest to the Butlerville area and of course the Austin/DesArc road that went east to the Butlerville area. There is a 1851 and 1863 map of Arkansas in the national archives and I'm sure others have them also. The scale is not large and only main roads are shown some accurate and some not. I think the cartographer sometimes made an educated guess, if the roads weren't researched or surveyed due to the area being held by enemy. On some period maps a road just stops in the middle of nowhere, you know the road goes on, but it was as far as they had occupied or had no need to go into that area.