He labors alone on a cold morning, his leather apron stained with soot, his workspace illuminated by a bed of glowing coals, hammering and refusing to bend with the times as cars whiz past his small roadside forge in East Waterboro.

Sam Smith is descended from a line of blacksmiths going back to the 13th century, but his parents and grandparents were farmers. He was 14, on a visit to a living-history museum, the first time he saw a smithy pound red-hot iron into nails, hooks, and other tools. “There was an instant connection, something deep inside me,” he recalls. “It’s almost magic — something a human can do with his hands, but also forbidden, because you can’t touch it directly.”

The very next day, Smith started as an apprentice, and he spent five years learning from masters. By the end, his soul was so enmeshed with blacksmithing that he took a portable forge to University of Maine at Machias. He majored in world history and minored in theater, disciplines that serve him well today as one of roughly a dozen blacksmiths using traditional techniques in Maine. “No modern tools, only tools that we make ourselves or that encourage the use of your hands,” Smith says. “Hammering is the technique. There’s no welding or other fabrication.”

Smith, 35, is the founder of the Maine Blacksmith’s Guild, whose members operate this forge, as well as ones in Bridgton, Wells, and Winn. It’s a business with an educational mission. “All of our profits go back into keeping these shops open as places for the public to interact with blacksmiths and for people to learn the trade,” Smith says.

A few years ago, the organization lost its flagship forge in the 19th-century Portland Company Complex after the building was sold to a developer, and it’s looking for another location with good foot traffic. Smith, meanwhile, stays visible with his portable forge at Portland-area farmers markets and brewery events, where he produces tokens like bottle openers and expounds on blacksmithing’s role in civilization’s birth (it’s the crucible that made all other trades possible, he believes).

Here, at Sokokis Forge, he pounds salvaged and new wrought iron and steel into fireplace screens and pokers, rotisseries and barbecue tongs, door knockers and handrails, harpoons and axes, earrings and bracelets. Today, he’s making a puukko, a traditional Finnish knife that should fetch $600. He’s a big man, yet he moves with an easy, practiced rhythm, his long-handled tongs plucking a small, glowing metal cuboid from the coals and securing it atop an anvil where he whacks it several times with a heavy hammer, flattening, thinning, lengthening. As the piece’s orange light dims, he slips it back into the fire to soften it up for another round.