Today's antiques world has caught up with Polk's enthusiasm. In the closing decades of the 20th century, Americana collectors, who once reserved their attentions for schoolgirl samplers, started focusing on silk pictorials embroidered in academies between 1800 and 1840 by advanced students of needlework. The value of these works is increasing as many fine examples preserved in their original frames emerge from obscurity. Scholarship shows that they were not merely a sentimental product of the feminine arts, but also a vehicle for educating girls when academics were exclusive to boys.

The art of embroidering canvases to create pictorial motifs -- raised, padded, and brilliantly spangled with pearls, coral, and metallic thread -- appeared in England during the mid-17th century. The practice crossed the Atlantic and evolved into canvaswork in the 18th century and then into silk embroidery in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Beginning in 1712 in Boston, one of the earliest American schools for needlework, George Brownell's, also taught writing and arithmetic (deemed "necessary graces for young women"). These fashionable schools, which also provided basic scholastic instruction, multiplied throughout major American cities.

"In America, one major stimulus to the fad was the huge outpouring of silk-embroidered memorials to George Washington after his death in 1799," notes Linda Eaton, curator of textiles at Winterthur. Teachers also devised patterns, featuring willow trees and mourning figures draped over urns, to be dedicated to deceased members of students' families.

Today, thanks to a growing body of scholarship, groups of embroideries are being analyzed and categorized according to the schools their youthful makers attended. "There were schools throughout the East Coast and especially in Boston and Philadelphia, but not as many in the South," says Carol Huber, an antique textiles dealer in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, who, with her husband, Stephen, specializes in American girlhood embroideries. "The sophistication of the work varied too, with the most complicated work coming out of cities where the clientele was wealthy and the price of an education high. Compare an education for men at Harvard for $300 a semester in the early 19th century with the women's instruction and boarding at Mrs. Saunders & Miss Beach's Academy for $350 for a semester."

By the 1830s the rage for schoolgirl silk embroidered pictures faded due to the Industrial Revolution, which yielded new needlework products. Laborious silk needlework evolved into quicker-to-produce needlepoint. Most teachers and pupils in larger cities abandoned the medium between 1835 and 1840.

As collectors refine their searches, they realize what young embroiderers knew 200 years ago. "By candlelight, the silks are iridescent," says Stephen Huber. "They add period dimension to a room." Though never meant to be sold as art, silk embroideries lend modern eyes a provocative insight into the Federal era.