Warsaw

Before the dams, Warsaw was a steamboat town. Boats reached it in 1843, built smaller and shallower than Missouri River packets to clear the Osage shoals and tight bends, and in the 1850s as many as seven could lie at the wharf at once, landing salt, iron and nails and loading meat, furs, grain, eggs and whiskey. Guerrilla violence stopped the trade in the war, and the first train from Sedalia in November 1880 ended it; the Homer C. Wright was the last steamer on the river. Since 1979 Truman Dam has held back the Osage here.

What the plaque says

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, 1851-61, 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. (See other side) Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1957 Warsaw (Continued from other side) 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. Erected by State Historical Society of Missouri and State Highway Commission, 1957

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Harry S Truman State Park — 3.7 mi
  A 1983 park on a peninsula in Truman Lake, the Osage River reservoir first planned as Kaysinger Bluff, with a marina, beach and glades found in no other state park.

More markers nearby

• Butterfield Overland Mail in Missouri - 1858-1861 — steps away
• Butterfield Overland Mail in Missouri - 1858-1861 (Quincy) — 17 mi
• Hickory County — 21 mi
• Osceola — 22 mi