Born at the Upshur family estate of Vaucluse in Northampton County, Virginia, in 1784, Juliet Upshur was the eldest daughter of Littleton Upshur I and Ann Parker Upshur.
On February 22, 1814, at the age of thirty, Juliet married a twenty-six-year-old Northampton County merchant named John T. Elliott. Elliott had been a business partner of John Upshur of “Brownsville” – a wealthy and respected businessman in Northampton County – from whom Elliott purchased a tract of land on the county’s Chesapeake shore. Eventually, the tract came to be called Elliott’s Neck.
Juliet and her husband lived in their brick house, “Merton,” on Elliott’s Neck until John Elliott died in 1825. After her husband’s death, Juliet moved to Norfolk where she lived with her sister, Elizabeth Parker Upshur Nottingham (1801-1879), who was also widowed, and her nephew, George Littleton Upshur.
Sometime in the intervening years, Juliet’s living situation changed. When the census was taken in Norfolk in June 1850, the enumerator listed sixty-four-year-old Juliet living with her fifty-year-old nephew George Parker Upshur – a distinguished commander in the U.S. Navy and superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy – and seven-year-old Abel P. Upshur. It is unclear why the switch was made.
The 1850 census recorded only “free inhabitants” of Norfolk. The more than one person that Juliet Upshur Elliott enslaved do not appear in this census. In her will, she bequeathed to her nephew, Littleton Upshur, one enslaved “boy” named William Henry. To another nephew, Thomas W. Upshur, she bequeathed her “negroes,” suggesting that William Henry was not the only person she enslaved in 1854. The total number of persons Juliet Upshur Elliott enslaved throughout her life and at the time of her death is the subject of ongoing research.
Juliet Upshur Elliott died on January 29, 1854, in Norfolk where she is buried at Elmwood Cemetery.
