Samuel Eliot was an American banker and businessman from the prominent Eliot family of Boston.
He served as president of Massachusetts Bank, and was a highly successful Boston merchant, owning and operating what was then the precursor to 19th- and 20th-century style department stores.
The second marriage produced six children, one being Samuel Atkins Eliot.He was the grandfather of Samuel Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton and Charles William Eliot.
His granddaughter, Mary Elizabeth Bray (1810–86), was married to Hamburg banker Johann Heinrich Gossler III (1805–1879), owner of Berenberg Bank and a member of the Berenberg-Gossler banking dynasty.
Mary was the mother of Baron Johann von Berenberg-Gossler.Eliot founded the Eliot Chair of Greek Literature at Harvard and was a corresponding member of the American Philosophical Society (1768).
In 1806, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.