Elizabeth Penelope Eelbeck was born in Chowan County, North Carolina in about 1752. The daughter of a prominent local physician and a descendant of the Blount family, Elizabeth came from wealth and was named in part after her aunt, Penelope Barker (née Padgett). Sometime in the early 1770s Elizabeth Eelbeck married Wyriot Ormond, a politician and lawyer from Beaufort County and the couple had one daughter prior to his death in 1773. In 1774 Elizabeth Ormond, along with her aunt Penelope Barker and fourty-nine other women signed a nonimportation agreement that later became known as the Edenton Tea Party Resolves. In 1777 Ormond married local physician Samuel Dickinson and she was again widowed in 1802. She died in Chowan in about 1818.