The Supreme Court of Wisconsin.
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"Humph! So it seems that a great question of constitutional law is to be determined on the point that railroads can deliver us early •vegetables." JASON DOWNER. Upon the resignation of Judge Byron Paine to enter the mili tary service, in 1864, Governor Solomon ap pointed Jason Downer of Milwaukee to fill
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the vacancy. This gentleman was born in Sharon, Vermont, September 9, 1813. His father was of English stock. The first ancestor in this country came from Salisbury, England, and settled in Hart ford, Connecticut. On the mother's side was the blood of the Huntington's, a stur dy English stock, nu merous and promi nent in New England. Downer was a farmbred boy of the old New England type. He had plowed among the rocks, mowed with the scythe on the hillsides JASON and about stumps; he broke steers, wallowed in the snow to gather sap in March and made sugar in the woods, had his three months of school ing in the winter, worked early and late in all seasons; breaking roads when the snowdrifts of a Vermont winter were higher than the stone walls on the roadsides, put there mainly to be rid of the boulders. In this tough tussle with the hardest of work among the busiest of workers, he developed as a boy. It was well calculated to take poetry and romance out of youth. When nineteen years of age, he entered
Kimball Academy at Plainfield, New Hamp shire to prepare for college. Two years later he entered Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1838. Soon after, he went to Louisville, Kentucky, and there read law, and was admitted to the bar and began practice. Preferring a new country and the class of people that came from the Eastern states, he established himself in 1842 in Milwaukee, in the territory then rapidly filling up with New England and New York people. His career at the bar was successful. He was a hard worker, managed his cases well, fought persist ently for his client, asking and giving no quarter. He rather enjoyed driving his adversary to the shel ter of the statute of jeofails and amend ments. For a short time in his youth, about 1845, he gave, attention to journal ism, and was the first editor of the Milwau DOWNER. kee " Daily Sentinel," now one of the strongest and most influential newspapers of the Northwest. But law had greater rewards, and he soon sold out his in terest in the paper and gave his energies to practice. Frugal and a good saver, with a tact for making money, he accumulated what, for a lawyer, may be deemed a hand some fortune. He stood high as a lawyer of force, learning and ability. He had few, if any, intimates among the lawyers, and was regarded by them a persistent, pushing prac titioner, a formidable antagonist, who kept opposing counsel on the alert.
