Roper Building

David Heighway

The recent restoration of the Roper Building has brought attention to the long tradition of African American owned business in Noblesville.  It has existed from the time of the founding of the county, when Pete Smith, an African American fur trader, was the first settler in the Noblesville area.  It continued up to and after the Civil war, notably with Stephen Roberts, a livestock dealer who was part of the Roberts Settlement family.  His wife Nancy became famous locally in the 1890’s for her catering business and provided the food for the finer weddings in town.  (She was also known for being the first African American child born in Noblesville, and for being 100 years old when she died in 1952.)    Other Black families in Hamilton County did well for themselves, including the Robbins family.  Dan Robbins was a former slave who came to Westfield after the Civil War to farm and who had become wealthy enough by 1914 to own an automobile. 

The Roper family was also probably a group of former slaves who moved to Indiana.  The patriarch, Greenberry (1828-1906), was originally from Kentucky.  Interestingly, he may have had a relative in Marion County named David Roper.  David was a farmer, originally from Kentucky, who enlisted in the 54^thMassachusetts Infantry during the Civil War.  He was one of the men killed in the assault on Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, which was later portrayed in the movie Glory.  Although Greenberry apparently didn’t serve during the war, he was very civic-minded.  He helped to organize a political rally for Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential campaign in 1872.  He was also appointed to the county Petit Jury in 1880.  Of his nine children, the son born in 1860 was named Abraham Lincoln and the son born in 1866 was named Grant.

Greenberry’s primary occupation was that of a barber.  It’s not known whether he owned his own shop, but his sons certainly did.  His eldest son, also named Greenberry, and two other sons named John and David ran a barber shop on 8^thStreet.  David (1856-1945) continued to be a barber when he occupied the building at 347 & 357 S. 8^thStreetsometime before 1920.  The building had gone through several incarnations since it had opened as a bottling plant around 1905.  It had been vacant by 1914 and no. 357 was still vacant when Roper opened his shop.  His first wife had died in 1917 and his second wife, Olivia, ran a boarding house in the building. It evidently attracted a variety of people. One of her boarders was an emigrant named Alfred Molefe, who was from the area in South Africa that today is called Lesotho.

In the early 1920’s, Roper decided to change his occupation and open a grocery store in his building.  It was interesting that this happened at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was a dominant power in Indiana.  It’s not known if he did this simply because he had the opportunity or if it was a response to rising racial tensions.  Whatever the reason, the store was an important part of the community for several years.  Along with continuing to run the boarding house, his wife ran the grocery when Roper became ill in later years – he died in 1945, she died in 1947.  Among other things, her obituary noted that despite her business career, she was “one of the most active political women workers among her race in the county” and that she “found time to give much attention to Republican politics.”

David Heighway is the Hamilton County Historian