Warsaw, a historic town of the Osage River Valley, was laid out in 1837 as the seat of Benton County, which had been organized two years earlier. Lewis Bledsoe's Osage ferry, started in 1831 for traffic over the Boonville-Springfield Road, stood east of town, while Mark Fristoe's rival ferry was to the west. Warsaw became prominent as a frontier river port and distribution point, with a land office here from 1855-61 and a Butterfield Overland Mail station from 1851-61; other county stops were Burns' to the north and Bailey's to the south. During the war years of 1861-65, Warsaw and Benton County suffered from guerrilla raids and troop movements. Warsaw was a Union post, and the Christian Church, built in 1840, served as a headquarters. Before Gen. Joseph O. Shelby's troops raided Warsaw in Oct., 1863, Union troops withdrew. In June 1861, pro-Southern State Guards in bloody conflict dispersed home guards north near Cole Camp. Benton County, named for U. S. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, was first settled about 1825 by Frenchman Narcisse Pensineau and German John F. Hogle, whose trading post site is now Hogle Creek. Though the Osage Indians had ceded the region in 1808, they and other tribes had large villages in the county until 1835. The first American settler was probably the fur trader Ezekiel Williams early in 1831 on Cole Camp Creek, and many Southern pioneers and numerous Germans soon followed. In the 1840's the county was the scene of the notorious Turk-Jones feud, or Slicker War. The first bridge across the Osage here, a swinging structure built in 1895, crashed in 1913. Today's Warsaw highway bridge dates from 1927 and the Osage Arm bridge from 1938. Today Warsaw is a tourist center at the head of the 129-mile Lake of the Ozarks formed by Bagnell Dam in 1931, and, centrally located in a county lying in both Ozark and prairie regions, it serves a resort, lumber, and livestock farming area.