Saturday Morning Visitor Archive

In 1845, the team of Edwin Cameron and L. J. Ritchey of Warsaw, Missouri, bought out one of the original newspaper publishers in Benton County--W. T. Yeomans--who had been publishing a paper under the name Osage Yeoman. Cameron and Ritchey changed the style of the paper and renamed it the Warsaw Saturday Morning Visitor. They issued the four-page Morning Visitor each Saturday as an independent publication, but in 1849, it changed names and politics, becoming the Warsaw Weekly Whig. Both publishers continued to work together until 1850 when Cameron left the business.

In 1851, Ritchey changed the name of the paper again, publishing it under the title Democratic Review. Three years later, Ritchey sold the paper to the firm of Murray & Leach who would change its name to the South-West Democrat which continued publication until the start of the Civil War.

Warsaw was one of the last western steamboat stops on the upper Osage River, and the Saturday Morning Visitor carried news from Jefferson City about the ongoing concern of improving the river for steamboat navigation. The June 17, 1848 issue of the Morning Visitor featured a lengthy article on the distribution of state funds for internal improvements and complained of the lack of money for improvements on for the Osage River. The issue states: "while this fund was yet at the disposal of the Legislature, that the friends of the Osage used every argument, and begged and entreated the Legislature, from session to session, to grant us an appropriation, but our supplications were unheeded, and we were finally told that if we wanted our river improved, we must do it ourselves. The people of the Osage, despairing of getting any assistance from the State, but not despairing of accomplishing a work of so much importance to their best interests, set about making the most out of the circumstances that surrounded them after the passage of the distribution act, and the result has been, that by uniting the funds falling to a number of counties interested in the improvement of the river, no doubt is entertained but that in eighteen months the river will have been so far improved as to admit safe and certain navigation for a distance of 300 miles at least three-fourths of the year."

An important paper of the 1840s, the Saturday Morning Visitor featured political and local news. It is one of the few surviving newspapers in the west central part of Missouri.