Stuart Residents Spot Problem With New Water Tower

Residents of Stuart, Iowa, say it was the talk of the town last weekend: The town's new water tower had STUART painted on one side—and START on the other, which faces a highway. "A lot of people saw it from the interstate and started to complain about it," Mayor Dick Cook tells KCCI. Photos and videos of the misspelling taken by resident Katelyn Johnson went viral online.

"It was hilarious. I mean, a lot of people were posting this, 'they don't know how to spell the town of Stuart.' That's fine," the mayor says. The town's name now appears correctly on both sides of the water tower, built because its population is growing. Newsradio 1040 reports that START was the result of a mistake by the painter, but not a spelling mistake: The first attempt to write STUART was off-center and letters overlapped while it was being repainted. (More Iowa stories.)