Edward Farmer

Born	Ansley, Warwickshire, England
Died	1727-05-27 Billerica, MA
Select Board
In Office	1703 - 1704 1706 - 1708
Spouses	Mary
Children	Sarah John (b. 1671-08-19) Edward (b. 1674-03-22) Thomas (b. 1683-06-08) Oliver (b. 1686-02-02)

Edward Farmer (about 1640 to 1727) came to Billerica from Warwickshire about 1671 and was the ancestor of a large Billerica family, among them the genealogist John Farmer. His father, John Farmer of Ansley in Warwickshire, died before 1669, and his mother, Isabella, a sister of the Rev. Thomas Muston of Wykin and later of Brinklow, came to New England with some of her children and married Thomas Wiswall, ruling elder of the church at Newton. A family genealogist found his baptism at Ansley on May 22, 1645, though at his death he was said to be about 87. In 1669 he was still in England, at Ansley, where he made a deposition before a Coventry magistrate. A marriage licence of April 11, 1668, names his bride as Mary Moore, daughter of Dr. Joseph Moore of Coventry; the Billerica records call her only Mary.

The birth of his son John Farmer was recorded in Billerica on August 19, 1671, and on March 24, 1672/3, the town accepted him as an inhabitant and granted him a five-acre privilege. His house lot was on the east side of Long Street, running north to "the corner," and it remained in the family for generations. When King Philip's War came in 1675 he and Thomas Farmer were assigned to James Patterson's garrison house. For a time after the war he lived in Woburn, where his daughter Barbery was born in 1677/8, but by 1679 he was back on the Billerica lists of families. His own house was later fortified as a garrison, and a family tradition from the 1690s tells how his wife, seeing Indians hiding behind a fence while she and the children were gathering beans, called to her sons to guard them back to the garrison before they went hunting Indians, so that the attackers thought they had not been seen and the family reached safety.

Through the 1690s his house seems to have served as the town's tavern and the place where the selectmen met, and a town meeting was held there on December 3, 1695. The selectmen put out two of the children of the absent Roger Toothaker to him and Joseph Walker. In 1694 the town sent him, Thomas Richardson and Joseph Walker Sr. to "deface & extinguish & abolish" marks and stakes that some persons had set up on the town commons without leave. When the new meeting-house was finished in 1694, "Mr. Edward Farmer" was named to the committee that seated the congregation. In 1699 he served with Jonathan Danforth and Samuel Manning on the Billerica committee that met Chelmsford's to alter the road between the two towns after a flood carried away the bridge and a new one was built higher up the river. He was a selectman in 1703, 1706 and 1707. In the divisions of the common lands he held five acre-rights; in 1707 he shared in the grant to the "North part of the Center Squadron," east of Long Street, and in 1708 he drew a lot of 72 acres west of the Concord River.

His wife Mary Farmer died on March 26, 1719, aged 77, and he died in Billerica on May 27, 1727. Their children were Sarah Pollard, born about 1669, who married Thomas Pollard; John, born in 1671; Edward Farmer, born in 1673/4; Mary, who married John Dean of Woburn; Barbery, who died in 1680/1; Elizabeth, who married William Green of Malden; Thomas Farmer, born in 1683; and Oliver Farmer, born in 1685/6, who stayed on the home farm. His sister Isabel, who married first David Wyman of Woburn and then James Blood of Concord, died in 1736/7 aged 85.

Edward Farmer

Edward Farmer

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