Mclouth ? Nature has left behind a reminder of the last ice age embedded in the middle of a residential street in this northeast Kansas town.

That reminder is a gnarled red rock so big, so deep and so stubborn that local officials couldn’t remove it. So they simply paved around it.

“That is why they call it Granite Street,” said McLouth resident Mary LaMar.

No flashing signs or billboards point the way to the rock, which reaches only halfway up a car’s door now, thanks to decades of paving that have raised the level of the street.

The town has never tried to make a fuss about the stone. Years ago, a high school student printed up bumper stickers that read “McLouth: Not just another rock in the road.” Few sold.

Still, most everyone in this town of 868 residents knows about it or has a story about it.

“My grandfather told me he used to stand on that rock to direct cattle drives, because it was tall enough for him to be seen over the cattle,” said John Bower, a 91-year-old McLouth native who spent 24 years in the Kansas Legislature.

Karla Smith said she thought the rock was odd when she first came to town.

“I wondered what kind of strange place I’d moved to,” said Smith, a waitress at Bartlett’s, which specializes in fried chicken.

“But I think it’s cool now.”

David Stalcup, who moved to McLouth in 1998, admits he finds the stone compelling.

“It’d be interesting,” he said, “to see how deep that rock goes.”

But most folks, including Stalcup’s wife, Clara, seem content to leave the rock as it is: unadorned, unfenced, unfazed by modernity.

“It’s McLouth’s little thing,” Connie Hedgepath said proudly.