In search of a legend and a dot on a highway map, I crossed the Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore a few summers ago, eased out of the Friday afternoon rush to the ocean beaches, and drove south on Highway 50 toward the dot: the crossroads of Bucktown where the life and legend of Harriet Tubman began.

Surprised to find the town still on the map, I wondered what else remained of this place and this remarkable woman. My research for a young adult biography of Tubman told me Bucktown had just one resident - a storekeeper - when Harriet was born in a nearby slave cabin and when she worked in the surrounding fields. In the Bucktown store, an overseer fractured her skull with a weight he threw at another slave who was running away from him. Harriet herself escaped from Bucktown in 1849 and returned to conduct more than 100 slaves north from the Eastern Shore before the Civil War.

The Dorchester County Historical Society had given me the name of a person to contact in Cambridge, the county seat eight miles north of Bucktown. Behind a glassed-in front porch in a row of frame houses near downtown, I found Addie Clash Travers, a distant kinswoman of Tubman's whose family has lived in the county since slavery days.

Travers had just come home from the hospital and surgery, but she sat in her chair looking out to the sidewalk and talked to me of Buck town, of Harriet Ross Tubman, and of the descendants of Harriet's ten brothers and sisters who still live in the county. (Harriet had no children of her own.) The names of Ross (Harriet's father) and Tubman (her husband) belonged to some of the earliest white settlers. A Lt. John Ross received 1600 pounds of tobacco in payment for serving in a campaign against the Nanticoke Indians in the 17th century. The Tubmans were a wealthy Catholic family who also came in the 17th century and freed their loyal house servants, including the parents of John Tubman, Harriet's husband.

Harriet Tubman is obviously a source of great pride to Addie Travers. "It's hard to believe she did what she did coming from here, " she says. "All that she went through she didn't have to come back and get her family, but she did. " Twenty-two years ago Travers founded the Harriet Tubman Association because she feels recognition of Tubman is important to black youth growing up in the county today.

"People here hadn't heard of Bucktown or been there or heard of Harriet Tubman," added Linda Wheatley, a member of the association, until the older people like Travers and Rev. Edward Jackson started arousing local interest.

Since she walks with a cane herself, Addie called on others with more willing legs to guide me around Bucktown and the fields where Harriet worked. "Be prepared for walking," I was told, and for briars, flies, and mosquitoes, which meant wearing long pants and long sleeves in 900 heat. The guides were Herbert Sherwood, grounds-keeper of an old church, and Monroe William Charles Edward Pinder, better known as Buddy, who grew up near Bucktown. Pinder, the talker of the two, had long memories of the area. Our goal was to find the foundations of Tubman's cabin, which both men claimed to have seen a few years ago.

As his long name implies, Pinder draws varied ancestors from the County's rich history. He traces his 6-foot, two-inch height to a Choptank Indian chief, his direct blue eyes and freckles to a white great-grandfather, and his brown skin to African-Americans. As we drove south out of Cambridge on Maple Dam Road, he identified farms by family name and whether or not the family had owned slaves.

Not far after a turn east on the Greenbriar Road stands a lone historical marker at the edge of a field of soybeans. Tobacco gave way to corn and wheat here when prices fell during the Revolutionary War. Now in the August heat, the corn crop was stunted by a drought, but the soybeans were growing after the winter wheat had been cut. This is the Brodess plantation site, the marker says, where Harriet was born and worked the first 25 years of her life. An old frame house used as a gun club and hunting lodge sits on the property, but it was moved here. The Brodess house and the slave cabins were across the fields and back in the woods, right up against the Greenbriar Swamp, where locals like to hunt the deer Bucktown is named for. Harriet trapped muskrat in the streams of the swamp and used the cover of the woods when she organized escape parties.

Harriet's grandmother Modesty was brought from Africa on a slaver in the 18th century and sold to the Pattisons, whose ancestors had come to Dorchester County in 1671. When Athow Pattison made his will in 1791, he gave Modesty and her daughter Rit to his granddaughter Mary, who married a Brodess and moved to this plantation in1800. Harriet was born in what she described as a ramshackle cabin in 1821.

Our search for remnants of the slave cabins or big house was fruitless, although we did find a few bricks, perhaps some of the very bricks brought from England to build the first substantial homes. A bulldozer had come through to create a fire lane, disturbing the underbrush. Pinder and Sherwood vowed to come back in the winter when old foundations would be easier to see.

Bucktown was easy to find, however, it was two miles farther down the road at the intersection of Bucktown, Greenbriar and Bestpitch Ferry roads. The crossroads now has three houses and the abandoned store where slaves were sent on errands. Here they heard news from Cambridge of Nat Turner's rebellion, of abolitionist trouble-making, and of fugitive slaves recaptured.

At the age of 13, Harriet followed an overseer to this store; he was following a fieldhand who had left his cornhusking chores. When the overseer asked Harriet to help capture the slave, she refused. As he picked up a two-pound weight from the scale and threw it at the fleeing slave, she stepped in the way. The weight hit Harriet instead, fracturing her skull and nearly killing her. She suffered "sleeping spells" for the rest of her life. The store itself sits abandoned at the intersection of the three roads, giving no hint of historical drama.

Bucktown has not always been so quiet. After the Civil War, at the turn of the century, the area was heavily populated by freed slaves, families with lots of children. In addition to the store and houses, there was a post office, church, school, and a racetrack. Pinder talked of land that was given by slaveholders to their former slaves, but then of titles that passed to white ownership through forgeries or government takeovers for back taxes. Now automated farming predominates, most of the land is owned by absentee farmers who live in Cambridge, and the people have followed the jobs to the city.

Pinder said that the second house to the west of the Bucktown store had a deep hole under the floor where potatoes were stored and fugitive slaves could be hidden. Oral tradition holds that a white woman in Bucktown helped Harriet escape when she decided to follow the Choptank River north and east to Delaware and on across the Mason-Dixon line to Philadelphia.

Pinder had roamed these fields in his youth when his family lived in Pindertown, a place – unlike Bucktown – is no longer on the map. Just south of Bucktown, off the Bestpitch Ferry Road, we followed two ruts with weeds in the middle leading to a spot where Buddy had slept out as a boy, a clump of trees hiding a long abandoned house without even a hint of paint remaining. Brushing away vines in a thicket in the back, we uncovered five tombstones. Only one was readable: "wife of Jonathan Brierwood, departed this life, Oct. 1827."

A quarter of a mile farther south is the Bazzle Church built in 1911 and a meeting house built in 1876. Sherwood maintains the site by mowing the grass and weeds, for it dates to Harriet's time when slaves came through a path in the woods from the Brodess, Meredith, Ross and Hughes farms for religious gatherings. Here Harriet learned of the Biblical Moses who led his people out of slavery in Egypt. She, too, was called Moses. Bazzle Church had services until the 1940s when people moved into town, but it has become the home of an annual Harriet Tubman celebration service in June.

Our last stop at Scott's Chapel revealed clearly the racial divisions in Bucktown history. In the cemetery behind the chapel on Bucktown Road, the white tombstones date to 1792, Across the road, the stones for blacks are much more recent. Here where the Clashes, the Finders, and the Jacksons are buried, the graves are said to be three layers deep, with the earlier, unmarked graves of slaves underneath. One of the oldest stones is for Annie Hackett, "born the year of freedom," which must have been 1864 when Maryland adopted a new constitution and freed the state's slaves.

Recorded black history began that year in Dorchester County. Harriet had no birth certificate, no baptism certificate or marriage certificate, no school record she was illiterate. What I heard was unrecorded in local histories, an oral tradition of names, connections, grudges, and memories stored in the minds of longtime residents.

"It's a lost history and hard to restore," said Rev. Edward Jackson, whose family owned and farmed land across from the Brodess plantation and whose father helped build the Bazzle Church. Blacks think some remnants might be found in family Bibles and records inaccessible to them,but the history is hard to uncover, Pinder asserts, because "they don't want to own it, that their forebears were slave holders."

Debra Moxey of the Dorchester County Genealogical Magazine says she has never seen a record of black births in a white family's Bible or an overseer's or farmer's records although she attributes the latter to a general lack of literacy and the private nature of country people who kept their business to themselves. Sometimes blacks are mentioned by first name in baptisms or burials, she says, but the only definite records of slaves are chattel records from the early 1860s when owners were freeing their slaves to enroll in the Union Army.

Moxey was able to provide a copy of Athow Pattison's will from 1791 giving Modesty and Rit to his granddaughter, a Pattison land sale and a Brodess will, the bill of sale for a Brodess slave named Harriet (not Harriet Tubman), and a copy of the bill of sale when Harriet's father, who was already free, bought her aged mother's freedom in1855 for $25.00.

The links can be traced loosely through names since slaves usually had the last names of their owners. Streets, cemeteries,chape1s, and phone books speak of dead and living Pattisons, Tubmans, and Rosses. (The last Brodess family member died in 1977 in Cambridge.) Pindertowns, Clashtowns, and Rosstowns appear on old maps. When I walked into the Cambridge Library and asked about Harriet Tubman, I found a living link, young Charles Ross, a descendant of one of Harriet's brothers.

Genes as well as names were shared. "We've got some on both sides of the fence," Travers said. Buddy's white ancestor, Edward Pinder, was one of the first commissioners to purchase land and layout towns in 1684.

Despite the links and sometimes because of them, the racial history is troubled. In downtown Cambridge next to the court house is a flat, concrete square. A plaque says that John Kennedy spoke here in 1960, but Travers says it was the site of slave auctions long before that. Two of Harriet's sisters were sold further south, a memory that gave her nightmares and fears that she would be sold. A niece was rescued from sale on this very block when her husband, a free black, smuggled her away while the trader was at lunch. He took her down to Long Wharf and a waiting boat on Cambridge Creek, then to the Choptank River to Chesapeake Bay and up to Baltimore, where Harriet met them with forged passes to leave the city for Philadelphia.

Research on Harriet Tubman opens up the troubled history in a relatively safe way. This is a black heroine whose triumph came only at the expense of a few slave owners' property rights, rights few people would defend today. Local people don't want to open up old wounds, but outsiders and visitors have provoked some interest, and the Harriet Tubman Association has worked to bring her story alive. Members have found that bringing Tubman's story to a local nursing home encouraged people to slowly share their own memories and family accounts of slave times.

In addition to the annual celebration at Bazzle Church, the association has sponsored trips to Auburn, New York, where Tubman is buried; to the Virginia Opera Association's production of "The Moses of Her People;" and to the Kunta Kinte marker in Annapolis. A Cambridge restaurant is changing its name to the Harriet Tubman Restaurant, the city library has her portrait, and Travers would like to see a plaque on the auction block and a Harriet Tubman statue or memorial.

"It's hard to believe she did what she did, coming from here," Travers said more than once. Thousands of dollars in rewards were offered by Eastern Shore slave holders for her capture, but she was never touched, and so the legend grew. Harriet died at the age of 92 in Auburn. After her last raid in 1860, she never returned to Maryland, but the people here surely claim her as their own.

North to Freedom

The Choptank: River is two miles wide at Cambridge, Maryland, On its way to the Chesapeake Bay. Somehow Harriet Tubman knew, when she escaped from slavery in 1849, that by following the river backwards, it would lead her north. Where it became just a muddy stream wandering over the Delaware border, she struck out overland through a gauntlet of towns to Wilmington. After crossing the Pennsylvania line into freedom, Harriet told her first biographer she felt like she was in heaven. "There was such a glory over everything. The sun came like gold through the trees."

She traveled by night, avoided the roads, and hid in swamps during the day. I drove by day, locked myself in motel rooms at night, and couldn't find a road that followed the Choptank. Instead I took every likely turnoff to the river Gilpin Point Road, Ganey Whart Road, and even Pea liquor Road. Tracing Harriet's route was a fine excuse for exploring, but I usually ended up at deadendS,no trespassing signs, or developing real-estate tracts like Choptank: Cove Estates and Blue Heron Properties. I did manage frequent views of the river and the obstacles Harriet encountered.

Foremost were waterways - the Warwick River and the insufficiently named Cabin Creek which are wide when they intersect the Choptank: and were unbridged then. Tubman must have walked miles inland to cross the waterways or found someone to row her across. Close to the water is marsh grass taller than any person – certainly 5'2" Harriet – and so thick and sharp as to seem impenetrable. My instinct for historical veracity was too weak to test it.

A few miles above Greensboro, the narrow Choptank abandoned Harriet, who always felt she could rely on the water. From there, no one knows if Harriet had help on her first flight from Bucktown, but on later trips she made use of the underground railroad. From Camden north, Delaware had one of the most established lines on that semi-mythical network of Quakers and free blacks who gave fugitives food, shelter, and clothing and quietly moved them on.

The first known underground stop on Harriet's route was Camden, home of "the damned Hunn’s of Wildcat. " (They were thus described in a 19th century book about a slave-kidnapper, Patty Cannon, who tried to snatch fugitives from the Hunn’s, and they, from her.) Asking around for a house called Wildcat, I ended up in the kitchen of a 1740s house that harbored fugitives in the cellar and a ghost on the stairs.

Many local people have seen the cellar room behind a revolving shelf of canned goods, but the ceiling ofthe room collapsed a few years ago. A few claim to have seen the ghost of a woman who broke her neck on the stairs. William R. Hunn, Jr., who lives in Pennsylvania now, was happy to claim his family's history in helping fugitives and to show me 18th century surveys of Wildcat Manor, a history of Wilde at he has written, and a genealogy of the Hunns.

Harriet may have found shelter at Wildcat, at the Cowgill farm in nearby Willow Grove, or in the Cooper House in town, which had a bunk-lined secret room above the kitchen. The Camden Meetinghouse was the center of Quaker anti-slavery activity.

She also found help from free blacks. "HarraL stops at my house when she passes ... , " wrote William Brinkley to William Still, black secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee who kept detailed records of passengers. Even though Delaware has a history of religious and racial toleration, records of blacks were harder to find here, too. I was delighted to find Brinkley's name in barely legible microfilm of the 1850 census, in the Historical Society of Delaware in Wilmington.

From Camden, Harriet told an historian she made use of stops at Dover, Blackbird, Middletown (more Hunns), and New Castle before reaching Wilmington and the always dependable Thomas Garrett. When Tubman decided to return to Maryland to free her family and others, Garrett provided some of the funding, transportation, and contacts along the way.

Freedom was still ten miles north of Garrett's store, which is now a parking lot for a community college. In contrast to Harriet's vision of glory when she reached Pennsylvania, I crossed a railroad track among heavy industry and refineries at Marcus Hook, an entry to the urban Northeast that doesn't look or smell like heaven.

The end of the line for me was a tree-shaded house in north Philadelphia, home of Mariline Wilkins, Harriet Tubman's great-grandniece. Wilkins' mother, Eva Stewart Northup, was raised by Tubman in Auburn, New York and was with her when she died in 1913. Mrs. Wilkins was the closest I came to “Aunt Harriet.”

Wilkins was reluctant, at first, to talk to me. She was angered by the white-written script of a 1978 television movie, "A Woman Called Moses." In the movie Cicely Tyson portrayed Tubman dressed in colorful clothes and pulling an oxcart laden with stones to show off her strength to the master's white guests.

"Harriet was mentally strong and worked in the fields, but she wasn't as strong as a horse," Wilkins said,"and she dressed very plainly - in black, navy blue, and white."

"Why write fiction," she asked, "when there is a real person to write about?"

She began to tell me about the real person, recollections her mother had passed on of how an aged Tubman was often short of food for the many nieces, nephews, and indigent blacks she took into her home. Despite service as a scout and nurse in the Civil War, she received no pension from the government until 1899. So, she would take an empty bushel basket to the barn and pray to the Lord to help her fill that basket.

Wilkins described herb remedies for gout and stomach ache and a recipe for cough syrup made from mold. She showed me potholders Harriet taught her mother to make out of old (clean) socks, and she brought out a scrapbook with the silk shawl that Queen Victoria sent to Tubman in the year of the Jubilee.

This was a more private Tubman than the public legend, but the sense of her historical importance was` strong. As a scout for the Union Army in the Civil War, Tubman led a raid up the Combahee River in South Carolina that knocked out rebel ammunition stores and freed 800 slaves at one time

"If a white woman had done that," Wilkins declared, "we'd have heard a lot more about it." Wilkins is often a speaker in schools to pass on the heritage she is proud of.

Wilkins' recollections, and those of William Hunn, Buddy Pinder, and Addie Travers, are the fibers connecting Harriet Tubman to the present. In search of a legend, I had found even more: a woman who would shoot her brother if he threatened to turn back to slavery, who talked to God daily and asked the Lord to fill a bushel basket with food, and who would rather steal a slave from a slaveholder than dust anybody's parlor.