SEARSPORT – The canoe is as much a part of Maine as its craggy coast and legendary inland waters.

So, in recognition of the craft that opened the state’s wild lands and helped define its Vacationland image, the Penobscot Marine Museum has assembled an exhibit from among many of the early Maine canoe manufacturers, as well as birch bark canoes made by Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indians.

The exhibition, “From Bark to Canvas: The Evolution of a Maine Canoe,” opens Saturday.

From the moment visitors enter, they can see the sweeping lines of the canoes positioned against walls and hanging from the ceiling. Through photographs, models, interviews, illustrations, maps and canoe ephemera, the display provides a detailed look at the history of the canoe in Maine – including the regional differences among designs from the Moosehead Lake region, Grand Lake Stream, Old Town and Rangeley Lakes.

Featured in the exhibit is a birch bark canoe built by the Passamaquoddy more than a century ago, as well as examples of some of the famous Penobscot River region canoe builders such as E.H. Gerrish, B.N. Morris, E.M. White and Old Town Canoe.

Kate Campbell, the exhibition’s curator, said the traditional canoe was used by American Indians to travel the Maine woods in search of game such as deer and moose. Historians tell of the practice of some native hunters of building a canoe from the hide of a freshly killed moose to transport their meat back to their villages.

Campbell noted that while archaeologists have found that dugout canoes were used in Maine, the birch bark canoe was the ideal match for the state’s geography.

“Maine has such a huge amount of water. Birch bark canoes were very light, and if you have a canoe you can carry there’s no limit to where you can go,” Campbell said Wednesday. “That’s why birch bark was so prevalent. If you can travel in a few inches of water, there’s no place in the state you can’t get to.”

Although a different method of construction is used to build them, there is a direct evolutionary link between birch bark and canvas canoes. A birch bark canoe is created by first shaping the outer skin from bark, then adding the ribs and gunwales. The gunwale is the upper edge of the canoe’s side.

With a canvas canoe, the skeleton of the boat is built first, then covered with a skin of canvas.

As canvas craft emerged in the late 1800s, the canoe evolved from sporting to recreational uses.

Canoe clubs for the leisure classes began sprouting up all over the state, and the canoe was marketed as a boat for romantic courtship. Wilderness resorts such as Kineo House on Moosehead Lake sponsored canoe excursions into the wild which also grew in popularity.

Clubs such as the Kennebunk River Club and the Bar Harbor Canoe Club were formed to promote canoeing, and women made up a large part of their membership. Photographs from the period depict canoes filled with women in white dresses and bonnets paddling through the waves.

“It was very high society,” Campbell said. “When you think about the people who go canoeing now, it was a very different time.”

Two canoes from that era featured in the show depict some of the designs that helped canoeing became popular with the general public. The Sponson canoe, built with flotation material along the gunwales, was advertised as “unsinkable.” The Old Town courting canoe, popular on the Charles River in Boston, became the canoe of choice for young men entertaining their lady friends on the water.

As an educational component of the show, Burt Libby, a well-known boat builder, will give demonstrations of some aspects of canvas-covered canoe building. From Litchfield, Libby contributed one of the pieces to the exhibition.

Campbell said the exhibition was an outgrowth of the museum’s watercraft education project, which included the documentation and conservation of the museum’s small-craft collection. That work was funded through a National Park Service grant. So Campbell decided that if the museum were going to put in a major effort to document small craft, “we might as well do an exhibit. I’m trying to reach a different audience. This is a chance to reach out to a different group of people.”

The Penobscot Marine Museum is in its 65th year of operation. Other exhibitions that will open Saturday will involve a comparison of recent acquisitions from the first year of the museum’s founding to the present, and two exhibitions in the gallery foyer: “Images of Belfast: The Photographs of Charles R. Coombs, 1893-1915” and “Dorothea M. Balano: The Real Log Painting of the Skipper’s Wife.”

“From Bark to Canvas: The Evolution of a Maine Canoe” opens Saturday, May 26, and runs through Oct. 15.

The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. It is on Church Street at U.S. Route 1 in Searsport. Admission fees are $6 adults, $5 seniors, $2 children 7 to 15; free for children 6 and under.