FORREST CITY — A solitary sign recounts how workers led by the namesake of this Arkansas Delta town, Nathan Bedford Forrest, laid the final leg of the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad over Crowley's Ridge, a hilly stretch of windblown soil running through the Arkansas Delta.
The marker stops there in describing the man whose name adorns parks and college campuses across the South, a Confederate raider and slave trader whose troops massacred black Union soldiers and who served as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
Nearly a century and a half later, many here in this majority black town that Forrest helped create know nothing of the connection.