FORREST CITY, Ark. (AP) — 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.

‘‘People think it’s forest, like trees,’’ said Amanda Clifton, who teaches at East Arkansas Community College. ‘‘People in my history classes, they’re surprised where the name came from.’’

Forrest’s real record shows him as neither all villain nor all war hero.

‘‘It is neither as good as it sounds or bad as it sounds,’’ said Brian Steel Wills, a history professor at the University of Virginia at Wise who wrote a book on the general. ‘‘Forrest is a lot more complicated than that.’’

Forrest compiled a fortune before the war as a plantation owner and slave trader who imported Africans even after the practice had been made illegal.