GRAND LAKE STREAM – This tiny town of 150 year-round residents is located at the end of the road – literally.

But the off-the-beaten-track location of this sportsman’s paradise in Washington County’s lake region has meant that canoes have played an important role in the town’s development.

The town even has a namesake canoe, the Grand Laker, which is heavier and has a square stern in order to attach a small outboard motor.

Those boats and the men who crafted them were showcased at this weekend’s 12th annual Grand Lake Stream Folk Art Festival.

“There has never been a company that built Grand Lakers,” Jamie Moreira of the Maine Folk Life Center at the University of Maine said Saturday. “It’s just been guys building in the winter time as a seasonal line of work. … In this part of Maine, it’s characteristic for people to do many different things. You guide a little, you work in the woods, you build canoes.”

Moreira called Grand Lakers the “pickup trucks” of Washington County’s lake system.

“They were workhorses,” he said. “It was all about sporting and having fun for the guys in the front of the boat, but for the guys in the back of the boat, it was very much a work effort, a way to make a living.”

Jon Shamel’s grandfather was the renowned local boat builder, Pop Moore, who hand-built his Grand Lakers between the late 1920s until his death in the early 1990s.

His canoes, as with all Grand Lakers, are twice as heavy as ordinary canoes. The boats’ roughly 160 pounds, square stern and small outboard motor serves the fishing guides and passengers in good stead when they run into wind and waves on the area’s large lakes such as West Grand, Junior, Big and Sysladobsis.

Guides quiet the outboards and paddle while their clients are fishing, Shamel said.

“They were built locally in the days before you could run down and buy an aluminum boat,” Shamel, who now lives in Jefferson, said while standing before a shiny, restored Grand Laker from the 1950s. “The point of this whole exhibit is to document the history of the Grand Laker, which is specific to this town.”

Even though the wind and water conditions haven’t changed, there’re not that many boat builders left in Grand Lake Stream to produce the Grand Lakers, according to the third-generation boat builder who now has brought his skills to midcoast Maine, where he works for a yacht company.

“It’s very much alive, but it’s very much a dying art,” Shamel said of canoe building.

One man still busy making his canoes by hand was working at the festival, attracting a steady stream of visitors who asked questions about his technique and watched as a canoe took shape around a wooden boat mold.

A sharp cedar smell rose up as John Houghton rapidly pounded brass tacks into the ribs and planking of his newest canoe.

Houghton, a self-taught craftsman who lives in this tiny sportsman’s paradise for part of the year, steams the white cedar for the canoe in an old-fashioned-looking device. He said he enjoys the work in part because of the form and the tradition of it.

“It’s very natural and functional,” Houghton said.

Pop Moore’s widow, Pip Moore, 82, was staffing the quilt raffle table at the festival. She is a retired schoolteacher who has many memories of her husband’s canoe building.

“It became his life’s work,” she said. “For a small town, we had quite a few canoe builders. Pop built many canoes that were shipped away. I’m very proud of the work that he did.”