Forrest City: Named for the Man Who Built the Railroad

The town you're driving through carries one of the more complicated names in Arkansas. Forrest City was built by Nathan Bedford Forrest, and named for him, and the history of both the man and the town runs through some of the darkest chapters in American life.

Forrest was a Confederate general best known for two things: tactical brilliance in cavalry warfare, and the Fort Pillow Massacre of eighteen sixty-four, in which his troops killed hundreds of surrendering Union soldiers, most of them Black. After the war, he became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He is also the man who built the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad across Crowley's Ridge in eighteen sixty-six, overseeing roughly a thousand Irish laborers who graded the roadbed through the Arkansas lowlands.

At the commissary camp Forrest established to supply his construction crews, a town grew up. On March first, eighteen sixty-nine, a county surveyor marked off a thirty-six-block townsite near the old commissary location. The community was incorporated as Forrest City on May eleventh, eighteen seventy, took over as the seat of Saint Francis County in eighteen seventy-four, and had nine hundred residents by eighteen eighty.

What emerged over the following century was a Delta town shaped by cotton agriculture, by the racial hierarchies of the Arkansas lowlands, and by its position on the rail line connecting Memphis to Little Rock. The name has never been changed. Forrest City is today a majority Black city of roughly twelve thousand people in the Arkansas Delta, a community whose name honors the man who founded the Klan. That tension is not historical footnote. It is the name on every sign at every city-limit line.