Benjamin Parks
American
Benjamin Parks was a Georgia farmer traditionally credited with kicking up a gold-bearing rock near Dahlonega in 1828, one of the finds said to have ignited the Georgia Gold Rush. He retold the story into his nineties, though contemporary documentation is lacking.
Biography
Benjamin Parks was a farmer in the north Georgia hills who became the best-known claimant to the discovery that set off the Georgia Gold Rush. By his own account, told and retold for decades, Parks was hunting deer west of the Chestatee River in 1828 — he liked to say it was his birthday — when he kicked up a stone unusually heavy and glinting with gold. He and a partner, Joel Stephens, leased the lot from its owner, Reverend O'Barr, and within months miners were pouring into the Cherokee lands around what became Dahlonega.
Historians caution that Parks's story, like several rival discovery tales from 1828 — including accounts crediting Frank Logan's enslaved workman, John Witherood, and others — rests on late reminiscence rather than contemporary documents; the first verifiable notice of Georgia gold appeared in the Georgia Journal in August 1829. Whoever was actually first, the rush that followed transformed Lumpkin County, brought a branch U.S. mint to Dahlonega in 1838, and accelerated the dispossession and forced removal of the Cherokee.
Parks lived out a long life near Dahlonega. In 1894, when he was in his nineties, he gave a famous interview to the Atlanta Constitution, still vividly describing the excitement of the first days: "The news got abroad, and such excitement you never saw."