Sherrill Bailey found an arrowhead in his family’s garden behind their Calhoun City home when he was 13 years old sparking a lifetime passion for Indian artifacts.
“My interest really grew then,” Bailey said of that first find. “My interest is not in the knowledge of it. History was never a good subject of mine. My interest is in the find itself. When I see it on that cotton row I’m so glad I found it.”
Those cotton fields are where Bailey has found the countless pieces, many dating back more than 1,000 years, in his large collection.
“I started looking in junior high school in Calhoun City and found dozens southeast of town,” Bailey said.
He renewed his passion for searching around 1990, traveling regularly to the Mississippi Delta, particularly Greenwood, Indianola and Yazoo City, to search the cotton fields for artifacts.
“The Mississippi Delta was jumping with Choctaws 1,000 years ago,” he said.
Archaeologists from Mississippi State University have come to see Bailey’s collection and confirmed most of his finds date back that far. They particularly took fascination with one of his pieces.
“They looked at one of my plaques and jumped almost a foot off the floor,” Bailey said. “They pointed to one of the artifacts in it and said that’s from the Arkansas Headhunters. They were so excited to see it.”
“Back in the day, the Arkansas Headhunters were across the Mississippi River and they would come in the western part of the state and find a stray Choctaw and cut his head off and take it back to their tribe.”
Other unique pieces in Bailey’s collection include a small carved head that he believes was once an effigy on a clay pot. Several museums have contacted him wanting the piece.
His collection also includes arrowheads, spear points, scrapers, beads, nutting stones, boat stones and more.
Bailey has several plummets that would be tied on each end of a string to throw at an animals’ legs to take him down. They were also used on fishing nets to make them sink.
He has an elbow pipe he found just south of Itta Bena in a cotton field after a good rain.
“It was just sitting right on top,” he said.
He said he never digs in any mounds and there are no shortage of them in the Delta.
“In the back roads of the Delta you’ll find huge mounds, just gosh awful big,” Bailey said. “One of the things I’ve run across a few times is graves of my people, both black and white, that were put on top of the mound to keep above the floods.”
His finds aren’t limited to Indian artifacts either. He’s picked up a tag that early farmers put on cattle to keep up with them. He’s found old coins, buttons and other collectibles.
“I found a token used by the big landowners who passed them out to their workers to use in their store,” he said.
Reflecting on his youth, Bailey said he did well in elementary school, making straight As in the first four grades.
“In junior high, I realized I had a girl’s name and got a complex and became real shy,” he said. “By the time I got in high school, I played hooky more times than not. I would go to the pool hall in the mornings and then go to ball practice and trumpet playing in the afternoons.”
Bailey credited Coach Otis “Shotgun” Shattles with keeping him in school, but said he finished with only nine credits in high school, “and two of those were in agriculture.”
Bailey would go on to East Mississippi junior college, then to Delta State for a semester and graduated from Ole Miss.
The first half of his career as a band director he spent at Bruce High School and then moved to Winona where he eventually retired and still lives there today.
He’s still active in music, judging band contests throughout the region – opportunities he said he’s been afforded due to “my incredible students at Bruce and Winona.”
He also spends his time playing golf and continuing his search for more Indian artifacts. He’s made five “plaques,” one for each of his grandchildren that feature some of his favorite finds.
“It’s something I’ve loved, so I want to share it with them,” he said.