But the plantation land in Columbia County is still referred to by a few old-timers as the ''Tubman Place,'' and there are descendants of his slaves on both sides of the Atlantic who still bear his name.

He can't be found anywhere else, not even where he lies. Although he was originally buried in North Carolina, he was reinterred, in accordance with his dying wish and willed instruction, in the church yard at the back of St. Paul's Church.

The church's original structure burned to the ground in Augusta's great fire of 1916, and the new church was made on the exact same footprint as the original - except with a new, 12-foot section added to the back. That section covers three graves, and Richard Tubman's is one of them.

A raised platform there denotes the crypt. But there is no marker for the three graves underneath, and the platform is piled with old, useless pews, twisted and broken, and short stacks of aged blue hymnals.

But back in 1838 - playing hide-and-seek somewhere among the cotton in its neat rows, or running reckless somewhere in the emerald grass of the Grain Coast - little Sylvia Cummings and William Tubman could doubtless remember the dead man who had owned them. She was just 2 and he was 5 when the Tubman people took Richard's name and his inheritance and set about making Africa their home again.

And as unwitting as Richard Tubman was of his slaves' fate when he died, so too were William and Sylvia innocent to the fact that they would fall in love. And that love would bring forth a grandson, a Tubman, who would rule all of Liberia as famously as, and more completely than, any man before or since.