Warsaw

Side 1: Historic town of the Osage River Valley, Warsaw was laid out in 1837 as the seat of Benton County, organized two years earlier. Lewis Bledsoe's Osage ferry, started in 1831 for traffic over the Boonville-Springfield Road (parts of which were also called Old, Military, or Wire Road), was east of town. A rival ferry, Mark Fristoe's, was to the west. Warsaw became prominent as a frontier river port and distribution point. A land office was located here from 1855-61. The Butterfield Overland Mail had a station in Warsaw, 1851-61, and other stops in Benton County were Burns', north of here, and to the south, Bailey's. Today Warsaw, a tourist center, is at the head of the 129-mile Lake of the Ozarks formed by Bagnell Dam, 1931. Warsaw and Benton County suffered in the war years, 1861-65, from guerrilla raids and troop movements. Warsaw was a Union post, and the Christian Church, built in 1840, was a headquarters. Before Gen. Joseph O. Shelby's troops raided Warsaw in Oct., 1863, Union troops withdrew. Pro-Southern State Guards in bloody conflict dispersed Home Guards north, near Cole Camp, June, 1861. Side 2: Centrally located in a county lying both in Ozark and prairie regions, Warsaw serves a resort, lumber, and livestock farming area. Named for U. S. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, the county was first settled about 1825 by Frenchman Narcisse Pensineau and German John F. Hogle, whose trading post site is now Hogle Creek. Prehistoric animal bones have been found in the county, an area known to early French gold and silver seekers and to explorer and trapper. Though Osage Indians ceded the region, 1808, they and other tribes had large villages in the county until 1835. First American settler was probably the fur trader Ezekiel Williams early in 1831 on Cole Camp Creek. Many Southern pioneers and numerous Germans soon followed. The county, in the 1840's, was the scene of the notorious Turk-Jones feud or Slicker War as it was called because victims were often slicked (whipped) with hickory withes. The first bridge across the Osage here, a swinging structure, built 1895, crashed in 1913. Once the area had 8 such structures. Today's Warsaw highway bridge dates from 1927 and the Osage Arm bridge from 1938.