County of Marker: Benton County
Location of Marker: Main St. & Commercial St., courthouse lawn, Warsaw
Marker Erected by: State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission
Date Marker Erected: 1957
Marker Text:
WARSAW
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, 1851-1861, and other stops in Benton County were Burn's, north of here, and to the south, Bailey's. Today Warsaw is 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, 1861-1865, 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.
Centrally located in a county lying both in Ozark and prairie regions, Warsaw serves a resort, lumber, and livestock farming area. Named bor U.S. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, the county was first settled about 1825 by Frenchmen 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 know 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 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 1913. Once the area had 8 such structures. Today's Warsaw highway bridge dates from 1927 and the Osage Arm bridge from 1938.
Update to this 1957 marker:
The only remaining Warsaw-area swinging bridge over the Osage River, now a part of a walking trail, is found alongside the Highway 7 bridge.
The Warsaw Christian Church served as a hospital and a stable during the Civil War.