You replaced the washer and it still drips
You did the job right. You shut off the water, pulled the handle, found the worn rubber washer, and put in a new one from the hardware store on Highway 60. A day later the faucet is still ticking away at two in the morning. That's a common call in Republic, and it doesn't mean you did anything wrong. A new washer solves one specific problem. A faucet has several parts that can fail, and only one of them is the washer.
This is especially common in the older neighborhoods around downtown Republic and the streets off Main Street, where a lot of houses still have their original compression faucets from the 1960s and 70s. Those faucets rely on a rubber washer pressing against a metal seat every time you shut the water off. If the washer is the only thing you replaced, and the drip persists, the seat underneath it is usually the next suspect.
Check the seat before you blame the washer again
Run your finger inside the faucet body where the washer used to sit, right where the stem screws down. If it feels rough, pitted, or has a groove worn into it, that's your answer. A worn seat won't let even a brand new washer form a tight seal, no matter how many times you swap it out. This wear happens faster in this area than people expect, because Republic's water carries a fair amount of mineral content, and hard water accelerates the pitting on brass seats over years of use.
Some faucets have a removable seat you can unscrew with a seat wrench and replace outright. Others have a seat that's part of the faucet body, and those need a seat-dressing tool to resurface the metal so it's smooth again. This is where a lot of homeowners stop and call someone, and that's a reasonable place to draw the line. Dressing a seat wrong can scar it worse than it started.
More on this from Why A New Washer Does Not Stop Every Drip.
Think about what winter and summer do to these fixtures
Southwest Missouri swings hard between seasons, and that matters more for faucets than people realize. Winter cold snaps here can freeze exposed pipes, especially in homes with crawl spaces, which are common throughout Republic and out toward Battlefield and Clever. A pipe that's frozen and thawed even once can send tiny bits of scale and grit downstream into a faucet, and that debris can lodge on the seat or the washer and hold the valve open just enough to drip.
Then summer brings the opposite problem. Heat and humidity make everything expand slightly, including the rubber washer itself. A washer cut from a slightly wrong-sized stock, or one that's the right size but made of a harder compound than what was originally installed, may not compress evenly across a full year of seasonal swings. If your drip started right as the weather turned, that timing is worth mentioning to whoever looks at it next.
Other parts that get blamed on the washer
The O-ring on the stem is a frequent culprit and it's easy to miss because it doesn't sit anywhere near the washer. If your drip is coming from around the handle rather than out of the spout, that's an O-ring problem, not a washer problem, and no amount of washer replacement will fix it. The packing nut can also be too loose or too tight, and either way it changes how the whole stem seats against the valve body.
If your faucet is a cartridge or ball-type fixture rather than the older compression style, there's no washer to replace at all in the traditional sense. A lot of homes built in Republic since the 1990s, especially in the newer subdivisions off Highway 174 and toward the west side of town, have these fixtures standard. Homeowners sometimes buy a washer kit for a faucet that never used a rubber washer to begin with, which explains why nothing changed after the repair.
When to stop and call a plumber
If you've checked the seat, ruled out an O-ring issue, and confirmed you're actually working on a compression faucet, and it's still dripping, the fixture itself may be near the end of its life. Twenty and thirty year old faucets, common in Republic's older housing stock, often reach a point where resurfacing the seat only buys a few more months before something else lets go. At that point replacing the whole faucet is usually less work and less money over time than continuing to chase individual parts.
A steady drip that won't quit despite two or three honest attempts is also worth having someone look at from a water pressure standpoint. Occasionally the problem isn't the faucet at all but pressure running higher than the fixture is built to handle, and that's a house-wide issue rather than a single-faucet fix. That's a job for a plumber with a pressure gauge, not another trip to the hardware store.