The most widely held wooden canoes are still the wood and canvas variety. These were made popular at about the turn of the century, and many hundreds of thousands of these canoes have been sold over the years.
"It was not until the builders of Maine completely changed the building system [ed - applied in birch-bark construction] that the wood-canvas canoe came into it's own. The theory of building upside down over a form with metal straps, nailing the ribs and planking together, and stretching the canvas over the wood hull must have been a radical idea to the Maine builders. The builders of the all-wood American sailing canoes and the Peterborough canoes had been using canoe forms since the 1860s, and it would seem reasonable that those building methods would eventually be copied by the Maine builders. However, there is no indication that the Maine builders were aware of the other building techniques. The all-wood canoes were not in use in the woods of Maine, and there were no builders using these techniques in the region."From The Wood & Canvas Canoe by Jerry Stelmok & Rollin Thurlow
Bill Miller has written a very nice short description of just exactly How to Build a Miller Canoe, that will explain what is involved in the construction of a wood and canvas canoe. This is not designed as a builders guide, but rather gives you a feeling of the steps involved to take a canoe from tree to water - so to speak.