By Hannah Curran, Editor
TRUSSVILLE — Preserved in a room at Gary Michael Roper’s house, rest shelves upon shelves of arrowheads, pottery, jewelry, and tools. Items that were forgotten and buried under the surface but now proudly sit on display for all to see.
“Everybody’s got different talents, and mine was finding things that people lost a long time ago, and 99 percent of what I have found is local,” Roper said. “A lot of people have lived in Trussville their whole lives, and they don’t know what was here.”
Roper said he’s been collecting artifacts since he could walk, and now nearly 78 years later, his collection has grown to include items found all over Alabama. The first arrowhead he said he found was when he was around nine or ten years old on the Cahaba Valley Golf Course.
Roper uses a metal detector to find most of the artifacts, but he says you have to know where to look to find something.
He even finds broken artifacts and, years later, finds the missing piece and fixes them.
“I found the tip of an arrowhead when I was 15 and the bottom of it when I was 54,” Roper said. “Some of it can be put back together, and some of it you can’t, but somewhere those broken pieces are waiting to be found.”
While most arrowheads have sharp tips used for hunting or as a weapon, arrowheads serve many other purposes. All arrowheads don’t look exactly alike, and each arrowhead was made for a reason. Roper shared an arrowhead that is curved on one side and straight on the other, appearing similar to a butcher knife.
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“So you notice arrowheads are not all arrowheads,” Roper said. “You have to know how to recognize the ones that are and ones that are not.”
Roper said he had discovered some rare arrowheads, such as the Decatur Point arrowhead, designed to twist when you shoot it. He explained that the Native Americans would continuously sharpen the arrowheads until they were no longer of use.
He said that people don’t give Native Americans enough credit for how creative and inventive they were.
“Like how many people today could go out into the woods with nothing but a stick and a stone and could make a living,” Roper said. “You have to know what you’re doing, and they knew every plant; they knew everything about the terrain and knew where every animal lived. They knew everything.”
Among his findings in Trussville, Roper has also collected relics that he said were found at Andrew Jackson’s camp.
“I found a button off of a uniform, and Jackson was probably one of the few that wore something even like a uniform,” Roper said. “I found flints out of a flintlock rifle, and because the Cherokee were their allies, I found broken Indian pipes.”
Roper has also found locks and bullets that he said were left behind McPherson Oil by a Confederate soldier. He also discovered a C.S.A. belt buckle and a comb on the Coosa River.
“I found the end of a bugle in the Cahaba River,” Roper said. “There’s only one place on the Cahaba River going into Trussville that was not deep and had a solid bottom that you could cross the river with your horses and wagons, and this fell off the bugle and into the water.”
When he finds a new artifact, Roper said it’s an overwhelming feeling because he loves history and sharing it with whoever will listen.
“When I found something, it’s like I’m the first person who has seen it in two or 3000 years,” Roper said. “All of this speaks of history.”
In Eutaw, Alabama, 175 miles from the ocean, Roper found several shark teeth, and he said that these shark teeth date back to Biblical times when God flooded the earth. He explained that in the Bible it said, “everything in the dry land died, but nowhere in there does it say anything in the ocean died.”
“The bible said that on a certain amount of days, the tops in the mountains were seen, well here in Alabama, we’re only 600 feet above sea level,” Roper said. “Mount Everest is like 30,000 feet, so that means that we were around 29,000 feet covered with water here in Alabama. These sharks are what cleaned up what was left when the flood came.”
Roper has shared his knowledge and findings in schools and at meetings with organizations over the years. He hopes to continue to share what he has learned with others.
“If they one day want to put up a museum, I would like that,” Roper said. “You realize one of these days you’re no longer going to be on this earth, and you either take the knowledge with you, or you leave it for others, and I’d rather leave it with everybody, so they have the opportunity to learn, and to experience history.”