The rare Oconee Bell is one of the first harbingers of spring. According to one account, the Oconee Bell disappeared from sight for nearly a century after the French plantsman Andre Michaux first identified it in 1788. Botanists no less renowned than Asa Gray, known for his correspondence with and influence on Darwin, searched in vain for another specimen of Michaux's plant. The elusive plant, like the Holy Grail, began to take on mythical proportions. Finally, after nearly 100 years, a 17 year-old boy named George Hyams rediscovered the plant in 1877 in McDowell County, NC.