Virtually every owner of waterfront property in Tidewater Virginia has gained an awareness of the importance of the problem of shoreline erosion either through the loss of his own property or through his observations of other properties. The problem is particularly acute for the homeowner who watches the reduction in the width of the fastland buffer between his home and the water. Aside from this obvious importance of erosion relative to the wasting of valuable land, the eroded materials also constitute a significant fraction of the total sediment introduced into the Chesapeake Bay system. The silts and clays eroded from the shoreline move into the deeper water and contribute to the general siltation problem. Most of the sands and gravels are left near the shoreline to form beaches or to accumulate in forms such as spits. The accumulations are at times troublesome if they block navigablThe basic informational elements used in this study were a topographic map series of the 1850’s and the 1940’s. Comparisons were made of the high water shoreline positions at the two times, with measurement consisting of areal changes for individual small segments of the coastline. The derived statistics are thus averages over a rather long term. These are very useful data but they do mask the short term variability in the erosional processes. e channels to tributaries.