Where are the savvy Americana connoisseurs? They’re heading south in search of Alabama folk pottery, Texas silver and Kentucky sugar chests. “We’re picking off collectors with southern roots who collected northeastern things and are refocusing their attention on regional material,” says Virginia-based dealer and scholar Sumpter Priddy III, who offers a southern sampler at the Winter Antiques Show in New York this month, with items like a claw-footed tea table from Virginia’s northern Piedmont area. “There’s a great sense of discovery and future market potential in this field. The South is where the Northeast was 50 years ago.”

Myths are being shattered—in particular, that all southern furniture is simple, backcountry stuff. The current show at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, “For Safekeeping: The Kentucky Sugar Chest (1790–1850),” is aiding the correction by focusing on a category of underrated finesse. “We have plain-style and nice urban, high-style examples,” says the show’s co-curator, Marianne Ramsey, an associate professor at Eastern Kentucky University.

Prices suggest that buyers are wising up. A record for Kentucky furniture was set in July when a 200-year-old cherry dressing table went to dealer Bob Crawford, of Richmond’s R. E. Crawford, for $130,900 at Mattox Auction Center, in Carlisle, Kentucky. Bidding for a client, Crawford was blown away by the chamfered legs and tobacco-leaf inlay on the front drawer.

While a Kentucky table is still a bargain compared with, say, a Philadelphia piecrust table like the one that sold for $6.7 million at Christie’s in October, pride is as big a motivation to go regional as price. “Southerners are increasingly aware of what was made down here,” says Priddy. “Collectors are hungry for stuff that is culturally relevant. One of my great peeves is that northerners think culture flows from north to south, but I can promise it’s a far more complex world than that.”

To get in on the action, you don’t have to visit the Bluegrass State. Last year Boston’s Skinner, Inc., offered an inlaid cherry desk and bookcase, made in Kentucky sometime between 1790 and 1810, which raced to $127,000 (est. $30,000–60,000). And at Sotheby’s Jeffords sale in 2004, a Federal-period inlaid cherry sugar chest also from that state went for $45,000, while a dome-top chest with a scalloped apron doubled its estimate to fetch $30,000.

Discovering new names is part of the fun. The Speed’s decorative arts curator, Scott Erbes, has launched a Web site (koar.org) that catalogues homegrown talent. “The site is designed to provide raw information about Kentucky artists and artisans,” says Erbes. As scholarship evolves, keep an eye on prices. They won’t be going south.

"Southern Comfort" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.