Now that the remains of the 460-year-old Wye Oak have been trucked away to a Kent Island warehouse to await their fate, the race is under way in earnest to find a replacement tree.

Enthusiasts are searching for a tree to venerate that is similar in lineage and girth to the Wye Oak, a white oak that yielded its national championship status to a violent thunderstorm this month.

Joseph M. Coale III, 58, author, historian and preservationist, wonders about his candidate, a majestic white oak - Quercus alba - that has stood guard over what is now Bellona Avenue in Ruxton for at least 350 years, and maybe as long as 375 years.

"It depends on what formula you use to determine its age," he said.

Soaring over 100 feet with a graceful arched canopy that measures roughly 150 feet, the oak, which is sometimes called Ruxton's Liberty Tree, has a circumference of 18 feet.

Coale realizes the folly of it all when one starts the hunt for the oldest or first of anything, but he'd like his tree to be considered as a possible successor to the Wye Oak.

There is a certain purity to the Ruxton tree not found in the Wye Oak, which for years was held together by five miles of cable, concrete patches and plenty of state money.

The Ruxton oak, on the other hand, is free of any cabling or concrete and is remarkably erect and full of foliage.

"I think it's the spirits who have saved it," said Coale, with a laugh.

The oak stands on a slight rise at Dunlora Road and Bellona, where Demos and Nancy Anastasiades live with their family.

It faces the historic St. John's AME Church, a whimsical Gothic Revival board-and-batten confection that dates to the 1880s.

Each day the tree bears witness to an armada of motorists who flow beneath its great canopy, which for a moment blocks out the sunlight.

"I guess I adopted it about 20 or 25 years ago, and I had a good friend who lived in the house where the tree stands," said Coale, a Ruxton resident.

Coale's interest in the tree deepened when he was researching and writing Middling Planters of Ruxton 1694-1850, published by the Maryland Historical Society in 1996.

To put the Ruxton tree in historical perspective, just listen to Coale:

"The tree stands there as a memorial to a more simple life. It is a living link with the past. Certainly Indians would have known the tree," he said.

"It also marks the east-west dividing line between two 1694 land grants, Young Man's Adventure and Samuel's Hope," Coale said.

Coale suggests that the tree was a seedling in 1646, meaning it came into being just 12 years after Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, waded ashore at St. Clements Island, near what is today St. Mary's County, to found Maryland.

The tree was there in 1694, the year Maryland's government abandoned St. Mary's City for Annapolis.

"If it could talk, it would tell the story of the Bellona Gunpowder Works, which suffered several explosions in its early years, and produced all the powder that was used at Fort McHenry during the War of 1812." Coale said.

The tree was also there when Irish immigrant workers dug the roadbed and laid the rails of the Baltimore & Susquehanna Railroad through the community in the early 1830s. The railroad, later the Northern Central Railway, is a component of today's light rail line that links Anne Arundel County to Hunt Valley.

On a bleak November day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln may have caught a passing glimpse of the tree from the window of a Northern Central day coach, as he sat writing what became his Gettysburg Address.

It was also there when the first motorcar backfired and bounced its way into Ruxton over a dusty Bellona Avenue, and the first airplane put-putted overhead.

But nothing lasts forever, and the tree's continuing health is a source of concern to Coale.

In 1997, he swung into action when he noticed BGE crews digging a trench for a gas line replacement. Happily, a Department of Natural Resources forest ranger investigated and reported that the line was moved to the center of the road and that no roots were encountered or cut in the trenching process.

In 2000, it was discovered that the tree was suffering from phytopthora, a fungus that attacks its delicate root fibers. Bartlett Tree Experts in Finksburg was summoned for consultation.

Samples from the tree were sent to the company's tree laboratory in Boston for study.

"This is one of the finest specimens of the white oak I have seen. The drought has not been easy on it. The tree is a community treasure that we are committed to do everything we can to save," wrote John Smithmyer, Bartlett's area director, in a letter to Coale last year.

"Because of last year's drought, the tree was literally beginning to shut itself down. Bartlett Tree came in and gave it several fungicide treatments and fertilized it. Dead wood, a result of the disease, was removed," Coale said.

Coale and the Anastasiades family have borne most of the cost of the tree's care.

"It has a massive root system and requires 5,000 gallons of water a week to survive," said Coale, who turns on the sprinkler system that delivers water to the tree once a week.

It takes 10 hours to slake the tree's thirst, he said.

"It would be a tragedy for us to lose this tree on our watch," Coale said.