From the centennial history of Seville: "The Evolution of a Rural Community" (1916)
The small number of letters shown by the postmaster's diary was due to another reason than the scarcity of possible correspondents. Getting a letter was a much more serious matter than at present. As the postage was to be paid by the recipient, it was something of a financial transaction to go to the post office and get a letter. If it came five hundred miles or over you had to pay twenty-five cents for postage. If your correspondent was less than five hundred and more than three hundred miles away, you had eighteen cents to pay, and of any less distance the postage was ten cents. When a day's wages were only fifty cents, a letter from a distant correspondent cost the price of a half a day's hard labor, and you could not afford to take it out of the post office unless it was a matter of some importance. The result was a large number of uncalled for letters advertised, which bore the addresses of prominent citizens who either did not care enough to hear from their correspondents to pay the postage, or in the general scarcity of money, did not have the cash on hand to get their mail.In 1830, Chester Hosmer, Henry Hosmer and Aaron Leland built a saw mill on the north side of Hubbard Creek…. During the fall, a stage broke down about three miles north of Seville…. The driver took the mail bags on his horses and came on to town, leaving the stage standing in the road. Soon after he had gone, Henry Hosmer and his wife and Nathaniel, Margaret and Martha Bell came along in a two-horse wagon, having been to Medina. They found the stage and took off its broken wheel, replacing it by one from their wagon, changed their horses from the wagon to the stage. The men mounted the box while the women got inside the coach. Hosmer did the driving while Bell devoted his attention to blowing the horn. Their noisy arrival caused a sensation in the little town and brought out the population en masse, headed by Dr. Eastman who kept the stage tavern. After having driven to Medina and that far back in a lumber wagon, the present generation would have considered the joke too laborious. But the laborious character of this pioneer joke did not dull the humor of it to the participants or to the lookers on. The old-fashioned stage coach was a tremendous institution in its day, and the uniformed conductor of the "Vestibule Limited" of today, pompous as he is, would have paled into merest insignificance beside the glories of the driver of the stage with its four and six horses, as he whirled into town and brought up with a fine flourish at the "Tavern."