Metcalf Bowler was born about 1730. He was a Rhode Island delegate at the Stamp Act Congress of 1765. This meeting held in New York was a gathering of formal opposition to the Stamp Act, taxation imposed on the American colonies by England. In October of 1765, twenty seven men from nine of the colonies met and after much debate adopted "Declarations" and prepared petitions to George III. Despite the mildness of these petitions, Parliament refused to receive them.

He was speaker of the Rhode Island assembly in 1774 when a royal decree reached Boston, closing the port and transferring the board of customs to Marblehead, and the seat of government to Salem. A conference was called to meet in Faneuil Hall, and on May 12th, at noon, Bowler came before the meeting with the official announcement, received in answer to a circular letter from the Rhode Island Assembly, that all the thirteen colonies had pledged themselves to union in opposing the decree. He was the first to announce, in a public and official way, the first united action toward resistance to royal authority.

During the Revolutionary War, many of Portsmouth's farms were damaged. The British troops filled in all of the wells, chopped down the trees and burned houses and farm fields. The cattle and sheep had been ordered off the island so they couldn’t be taken by the enemy for food. After the war it took Portsmouth farmers a while to get going again.

Metcalf Bowler was playing both sides so he would be on the winning side no matter the outcome and kept his farm safe by secretly working with the British. The nature of his treachery did not come to light until the 1920s when historians had occasion to look carefully at his correspondence with Sir Henry Clinton. Bowler's farm was off Wapping Road and there are legends about the Rhode Island Greening Apple developed in his greenhouses from a tree that came from the ancient site of the Garden of Eden.