Silas Downer (1729-1785) patriot and lawyer, Patriot Ancestyor to Lowell Downer,was born in Norwich, Connecticut to a farm family that subsequently moved to Sunderland Massachusetts, nears Deerfield, where Downer got his early schooling. He entered Harvard College at age fourteen and earned an undergraduate degree and a master of arts by age twenty-one. After graduation in 1750, Downer came to Rhode Island to apply his remarkable talent in calligraphy as a scrivener, or professional penman, copyist, letter-writer, and public notary. As one of the very few highly educated men in the colony at that time, he soon entered into the practice of law. Several of his most influential clients, who were increasingly numbered among his best friends and patrons, were Stephen and Esek Hopkins and the Brown brothers of Providence.

During the decade of the 1760's he served as clerk of the upper house of the General Assembly and as Liberian of the Providence Library. He also initiated the drive to build a Market House in Providence and served on the legislative committee that revised the general laws. As the constitutional dispute with the mother country developed after 1763, Downer used his writing skills to compose a series of essays and remonstrance's against the current commercial and administrative policies of England. Several of these protests have been discovered, collected, and edited by historian Carl Bridenbaugh under the title Silas Downer: Forgotten Patriot (1974). Downer's most important patriotic treatise was his 1768 Discourse delivered at the dedication of the Liberty Tree in Providence. This work, repudiation the recently passed Declaratory Act, has been cited as the first significant challenge to the authority of Parliament to make laws of any kind to regulate the colonies. Professor Bridenbaugh (with some hyperbole) as called Downer's oration "the most important single event in the pre-revolutionary history of the colony of Rhode Island."

Silas Downer Downer continued his efforts as "a son of liberty," and , in 1774, Stephen Hopkins took Downer to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia to be secretary of the Rhode Island delegation, which was headed by Hopkins and his former rival Samuel Ward. Once war erupted Downer severed as clerk of the state's Council of War. Following the conflict, he returned to the practice of law without fanfare or notoriety. He died on December 15, 1785 at the home of his cousin in Roxbury, Massachusetts. More than any other man, he can be described as Rhode Island's "Penman of the Revolution."