John Farmer

John Farmer (1789-1838), the New England antiquary and genealogist, wrote the first history of Billerica, An Historical Memoir of Billerica (Amherst, New Hampshire, 1816), and in 1931 the town's Town Forest Committee formed a "Farmer Park" on Black Brook "as a memorial to Billerica's first Historian". He was born in Chelmsford on June 12, 1789, the eldest son of John Farmer and Lydia Richardson, daughter of Josiah Richardson of Chelmsford, who had married in January 1788. His father was a son of Oliver Farmer of Billerica, who died "on the paternal farm" (the Oliver Farmer House) in 1814, and a descendant of Edward Farmer, the family's first settler in Billerica. The family left Chelmsford in 1803 for Lyndeborough, New Hampshire, and later lived in Merrimack.

He studied under the Rev. Hezekiah Packard, at sixteen became a clerk in a store at Amherst, New Hampshire, and after five years, his health failing, turned to schoolteaching in 1810. He read medicine for a few months with Dr. Matthias Spalding of Amherst, and in 1821 he moved to Concord, New Hampshire, where he opened an apothecary's shop with Dr. Samuel Morril, which earned him the title of Doctor. Frail all his life, he seldom left home and gave his time to the records of New England families and towns.

His Billerica memoir, drawn from the town and proprietors' records, set out the town's settlement, garrisons, ministers, deacons, town clerks and representatives, and later historians of the town built on it. He also published a register of the descendants of Edward Farmer (1813), a historical sketch of Amherst (1820), an ecclesiastical register of New Hampshire (1822), with Jacob B. Moore a Gazetteer of the State of New Hampshire (1823), the yearly New Hampshire Annual Register, an edition of Jeremy Belknap's History of New Hampshire (1831), and his great work, the Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England (1829). He was corresponding secretary of the New Hampshire Historical Society from its founding in 1823 until his death, and from 1837 he arranged and bound the state's archive papers for the legislature. He never married. He died at Concord on August 13, 1838, aged 49; his gravestone calls him "Distinguished as an Antiquarian and Scholar."

The Farmer Park of 1931 was made of 5.86 acres acquired from Mrs. Roloff, Miss Farmer, and John Farmer and his wife, and 6.88 acres from Warren H. Manning, "to form the 'Farmer Park', as a memorial to Billerica's first Historian, and to assure a place for the Troop No. 1, Boy Scouts of America, 'Camp Manning' that they have built." The tract ran from the Chelmsford Road down Black Brook, with sites for dams to make ponds.

References

1. Memoir of John Farmer, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 1 (1847): birth at Chelmsford June 12, 1789, career, works, death at Concord, N.H., Aug. 13, 1838
2. John Farmer, An Historical Memoir of Billerica (Amherst, N.H., 1816)
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register p. 50, FARMER 9: John Farmer, the eminent New England genealogist and author of the Historical Memoir of Billerica
4. Billerica town report 1931: Town Forest Committee forms the Farmer Park as a memorial to Billerica's first historian