I have additional photos of the dovetailing, chamfering, and interior of the drawers, as well as the brass pull attachments, if those would help.... (?)

Pretty!

Repost it onto the antiques forum--might as well post the other photos while you're at it.

http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/antiques

Your memory serves you well.

It's an American interpretation of the French Empire style. It could be as early as 1815 but probably not much later than 1830. Virtually every fashionable furniture maker at the time was making them, even Duncan Phyfe, but unless you can find marks (often written in pencil, somewhere out of sight) you're simply not going to be able to attribute a name to the maker.

In general the carving on the columns is called "acanthus". The feet are somewhat more plain then the columns but this could well be a matter of the date it was made and/or the place. Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore are all possible areas for a chest as nice as this. In any of these urban areas we would expect the feet to be equally well carved paw feet. But get a little ways out of town, find a capable furniture maker, and the plainer foot could easily be explained.

Whether you call it a chest of drawers or a dresser is more or less up to you. I'd call it a chest of drawers. (A dresser would have been a member of the household staff.)

The wood face is definitely "Flame Mahogany" although generally it will turn out to be a veneer. That's not a fault; the best figured mahogany was already becoming scarce by that time, and what they called veneer was likely at least 1/8th inch thick. You should be able to see it on the drawers, looking at the thickness edge, but it's much easier to simply look at the inside surface of the drawer front. If it doesn't have the same figure as the face, then the face is a veneer.

The only negative that I note is this set of drawer pulls. A piece made very early in that 1815-30 period could have originally had drawer pulls that looked like this, but I'd be VERY suspicious of that set... I'd have to see and feel them to be certain, but they simply do not appear to be period pulls.

Even so, in my opinion this chest is well above average. The one thing I won't comment on is value, save to say that in this market it won't be as high as you wish, perhaps not as high as you paid "years ago". But, nice as it appears to be, it will sell.