Inside the building that was once Harriet Tubman Junior-Senior High School, memories abound.

Here in the county's first gymnasium for black students - small and dimly lit as it was - Howard Lyles played a pretty average game of basketball with his fellow farm boy friends. There in front of that green chalkboard, he earned fairly average grades, despite being taught by "the finest teachers that anyone could assemble."

Out this front door and across the street, young Howard would spend his nickels on Mary Jane candies at a black-owned corner store after school.

"And see here? Right here's where the principal's office used to be," Lyles, a retired Maryland prison warden who is 67, remembers with a smile. "Yeah, I got in here a couple times."

This trip down memory lane is more than simple nostalgia. For Lyles and other Howard County African-Americans, the ability to walk through the old school, and see, feel and remember what went on there, is symbolic, cultural and even vital.

"I cannot tell my grandson or my son any live description of what Cooksville was," said Lyles, referring to the all-black school that preceded Tubman, the county's first black high school to graduate students from the 12th grade. "With Harriet Tubman, I can still bring them here. They could come here; they could have a walk-through. They could see what Harriet Tubman was all about."

The stories behind Harriet Tubman School have been fondly revisited here since a coalition of nonprofit groups made it known they were eyeing the school as a likely site for a county crisis center for battered women, victims of sexual abuse and others in need of shelter.

Proposals to open such a facility in three other locations - in Ellicott City, Long Reach and Kings Contrivance - were fiercely opposed by the surrounding communities, mostly because of safety concerns.

As the news spread that Harriet Tubman was the latest option, an uproar surfaced in areas of Howard County inhabited by blacks - particularly those who feel strongly that their battered, abused and forgotten history was more in need of the space.

"If this building becomes something else, when we pass on, the public will never know that Harriet Tubman ever existed," said Lyles, who graduated in 1952. "And we would lose our history."

Established in 1948 after a 20-year struggle by blacks in the county to have their own high school, the building is named for the famous heroine who tirelessly led slaves along the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North.

Howard County folklore has it that a stone quarry down the grass-lined road from the Tubman school hid runaway slaves until it was safe to move on, making even the name of the school all the more special to local black people.

It was smaller than county white schools, the play areas were unsuitably hilly and black teachers had to come from Baltimore to conduct classes.

But the school's students were proud. And still are, even though integration closed the school in 1965.

"To us, it was heaven-sent," Lyles said, "from what we were being educated in before."

"It has an honor place in our history and the legacy of the black community," said Harts M. Brown, presiding elder of the Council of Elders of the Black Community of Howard County.

At a community meeting this month about the crisis support center, Tubman graduates and devotees tried to get that message across.

But even after speaker after speaker poured out their hearts, said Ken Jennings, vice president of operations of the African American Coalition of Howard County, it seemed some people still didn't get it.

"It wasn't about whether the crisis center was good or not," Jennings said. "It was about the importance of the location. They didn't seem to understand why black folks would have such strong feelings about a building. I guess to them, it's just bricks and mortar."

There's nothing quaint about the one story, red-brick structure near Atholton High School in Columbia. On the outside, it looks like many other buildings of the government or institutional variety. And purists might not consider the 54-year-old Harriet Tubman building to be historic.

But African-Americans in the county say it is that and more.

"The building is not just a building," Jennings said. "It's a symbol of black people, of Howard County's hopes and struggles. That's all wrapped up in there."

Today, the building is being used by school system maintenance workers and Head Start, an early-childhood program. What would be a more fitting use of the building's remaining space, Jennings and others said, would be a cultural center with a museum, a library and educational programs.

In addition, many neighborhood groups have applied repeatedly to use the building as a community center for neighborhood children and senior citizens. Youth programs - such as chess clubs - could relocate there from several scattered sites across the county, they say.

The Howard County Center for African-American Culture wants to give up its leased rooms in Town Center and move to the Tubman campus.

Jennings said representatives of many African-American groups in the county have begun to talk about starting a foundation that would be an advocate for the best interests of the school, its grounds and its rightful users.

"We envision a site that has history that is deeply woven into the fabric of the African-American community," Jennings said.

Lyles' graduating class is holding a reunion picnic and banquet next month, and will take a tour of the building the classmates so fondly remember.

Tubman's aging graduates are imagining what the reunion will be like.

They will stroll the checkerboard tile and touch the stacked green lockers - still in good condition - a testament to how well the Tubman kids cared for their school.

They will peer out the windows to the spot where the candy store used to be, or where they stole a first-crush-kiss, or ran, late, for the yellow school bus that would carry them back to Clarksville, Cooksville, Ellicott City, Marriottsville, the edges of Laurel and West Friendship.

They will bring memorabilia to laugh about and spark long stories about the good old days - like the stubby stool Lyles used every day to milk the cows on his father's farm before walking nearly a mile to the school-bus stop.

"Their stories are our stories, even though some of us moved to Howard County years later," Jennings said. "We're all inter-connected."

Aspects of the Cooksville-Harriet Tubman High School Class of 1952 50th Reunion will be held July 16, 18, 20 and 21. Information: Howard Lyles, 410- 988-9701.