Trussville man makes lifetime of artifact discovery

After an hour of looking through arrowheads under glass, sharks’ teeth in a wooden box and pottery pieces stacked on shelves in a south Trussville bedroom, Mike Roper wasn’t finished.

“We haven’t even scratched the surface,” he said.

After another hour, he said he had probably shown enough. When that statement was met with sustained enthusiasm to learn more, he was again not finished.

“Let me show you a few other things,” Roper said.

He could go all day.

Mike Roper, 78, has been looking for historical artifacts in the dirt, grass and water for 70 years. Much of what fills a bedroom in his home — more like a small museum — has come from around Trussville. He’s gradually added to the room over 30 years.

“You have to know what you’re looking for,” Roper said. “There’s a world of stuff to know, and people walk over it every day and haven’t got a clue what was here before they were. They live in a place all their life and don’t know.”

Roper has collected artifacts in the Trussville area that he said were likely part of Andrew Jackson’s camp during the Creek War of 1813-1814. Roper said he found a uniform button and arrowheads made of material that came from the Tennessee River, which makes sense because Jackson was appointed colonel of the Tennessee militia.

He has found locks and bullets from the area near the Trussville Industrial Park, likely from Confederate soldiers. He has found a Confederate States of America (CSA) belt buckle, a Yankee bugle in the Cahaba River, thousands of Native American arrowheads, some rusted pocket knives and even a button recognizing the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

In Eutaw, about 175 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, not even as far south as Montgomery, he found sharks’ teeth. He believes they date back to biblical times, when God flooded the earth with rain for 40 days and 40 nights, as told in the book of Genesis. Roper said that, according to the Bible, everything in the dry land died, but it does not mention life in the ocean dying. He tries to be a godly man, one who strives to “commit your way unto the Lord and He’ll give you the desires of your heart.” Roper believes that factors into his ability to discover historical artifacts.

“It just comes natural to me,” he said. “It’s unusual, and a lot of people probably aren’t going to believe it, but it’s true.”

He speaks eloquently of Native American ingenuity and Civil War history. The books stacked atop Roper’s shelves are well-worn and filled with orange sticky notes marking specific pages. He knows what page a particular piece of Civil War history is on. Painstakingly, he has studied.

It is hard to find artifacts during the summer, when grass is thick and tall. Roper, a longtime machinist at Southern Precision in Birmingham, used to hunt artifacts every morning. He’d use a metal detector and dig until he couldn’t anymore.

If it isn’t clear, he is a history lover.

“I heard a fella once say, ‘If you don’t know where you’re coming from, chances are you don’t know where you’re going,’” Roper said. “These people were here ages before we got here, and I’m talking about all over Trussville, too. They left things, just like you and I [will]. They’re not going to take it with them. They left it, and if you know what they left and where they left it and why they left it in that particular place, then you know where to find it.”

It was just before lunchtime one day over the summer, and it wasn’t too hot yet. He took his wife’s van and headed southeast, toward the Cahaba River near the St. Clair County line. The grass was high, even momentarily hiding a deer that bounded across a dirt path in front of the van. Roper pushed through chest-high green just to get a better view of the Cahaba River, of areas he searched even as a young boy. In a small patch of dirt that is now being used to grow vegetables, Roper found a few chips of flint, used in the making of arrowheads.

“You never know what people leave behind,” he said. “Just like you and I, we’re going to leave it behind, too.”