The Stagecoach Stop guest house currently sits on the same 1.5 acre property as Hoerster House, though, unlike Hoerster House, its origins are far murkier and have never been fully documented. For instance, the fact that it was built in the 1850s is mostly inferred from the building's architecture, rather than any primary source document. Its timber-framed construction, combining wood beams with stone infill, is referred to as fachwerk, a type of construction that dates to 15th century Germany and is shared by buildings in other Texas towns that were settled by Germans at the time, like Fredericksburg.


Part of this building's mystery is because there was no newspaper in Mason County before 1877. If there were courthouse records that illuminated the building's previous occupants, they were likely lost in the 1877 fire that destroyed the Mason County Courthouse. What is known, however, is that around the time it was built, the land was owned by Henry Francis Fisher and Burchard Miller, the original stewards of the controversial land grant that led to Germans settling on established Comanche hunting territory.

To the modern-day urban dweller, a "route" is a Rube-Goldbergian sequence of subway tunnels, bus lines, and bike lanes, and "inconvenience" is seldom worse than a missed train or a crowded bus. But a route in 19th-century Texas was a long stretch to nearly anywhere you needed to go. It was days in a wagon, dust swirling about, and the nauseating rumble over dirt roads to the rhythm of whatever pack animal was trotting ahead of you. In the early days, stopover points were rarely a cozy inn with food and shelter. Certainly, the further west you headed, the more likely that your checkpoint was under a tree by a stream. But these long stretches on well-worn trails were a boon to the frontier settler. They enabled development, communication, and far-flung fortunes, if you could stomach the ride.

The Pinta Trail that runs north of Fredericksburg through Mason and west to El Paso has figured in several eras of Texas history and served a significant role to those venturing westward from Central Texas. What began as a hunting path used by nomadic Plains Tribes became the primary route travelled by the Spanish between Presidio San Antonio de Bexar and Presidio de San Sabá in the mid-18th century. A century after that, the road was used by freighters, or heavy-duty wagons, to haul building materials and supplies to frontier forts, like Fort McKavett. By the 1850s, as more people settled west, there was a greater need for passenger transport and mail service, so the Pinta Trail became the San Antonio-El Paso Road, the same path by another name, and now paraded on by cramped stagecoaches and courier wagons. Then word of gold in California spread, and suddenly, starry-eyed Texans needed to go west, and fast. By the time the railroads came, the party was over, and once bustling places that did not end up on a train route were doomed to obscurity—towns like Mason.