 The society is one of New England's oldest and most prominent organizations dedicated to the acquisition, preservation, and dissemination of public records and private monuments that would otherwise have decayed and been forgotten.In addition to editing the first volume of Belknap's "History of New Hampshire" (1831), Farmer published a valuable "Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England" (1829); histories of Billerica, Massachusetts, (1816), and Amherst, New Hampshire, (1820), and, in collaboration with J.B. Moore, "A Gazetteer of New Hampshire", (1823).