The umlaut crisis in Lindström is over.
MnDOT crews on Thursday morning installed new highway signs with the double dots over the "o" in the town's name, bringing an end to the saga that bubbled up after officials in the small town in Chisago County complained that the umlauts had vanished when new signs were recently updated.
"We had some extra umlauts," joked MnDOT spokesman Kevin Gutknecht in a tweet announcing the swift action by the agency to restore the missing punctuation.
On Wednesday Gov. Mark Dayton issued an executive order that umlauts missing from highway signs in Lindström be reinstated.
"If I have to drive to Lindström and paint the umlauts on the city limit signs myself, I will do it," the governor said Wednesday.
Umlauts had been used on city signs in Lindström for two decades, until the signs were replaced following the most recent U.S. Census. When the signs were replaced, MnDOT omitted the umlauts because they did not conform with the Standard Alphabets for Traffic Control Devices," the federal guideline for highway signs.
Some town residents said the umlauts are both critical to spelling and saying it correctly, and an important symbol for a city tucked in the middle of an area that draws some 3,000 Swedish tourists annually. They're drawn by the real history of the Chisago Lakes area and by the area's role in Sweden's most famous fictional saga of emigration.
