Qualla: Eastern Shore of Virginia

Eastern Shore of Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JodyMBrumage, CC BY-SA 4.0. The word "Accawmack" in the language of the indigenous people who lived here meant the other shore. The English colonists who arrived in the 1630s heard the word, kept it, and applied it to the strip of low land they could see across the bay from Jamestown. Almost four centuries later the name and the meaning still fit. The Eastern Shore of Virginia is seventy miles long and rarely more than ten miles wide, a finger of farmland and salt marsh attached to Maryland to the north and separated from the rest of Virginia by twenty miles of Chesapeake Bay. To this day, even with a seventeen-mile bridge tunnel connecting it to Norfolk, it remains a place that locals call simply The Shore.

Image: JodyMBrumage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eastern Shore of Virginia: One of the First Eight

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jb91archivist, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1634, under the direction of King Charles I, the Virginia House of Burgesses divided the colony into eight original shires. Accomac Shire was one of them, the easternmost, taking in the whole of Virginia's Delmarva territory. In 1642 the name was anglicized to Northampton Coun...

Image: Jb91archivist | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eastern Shore of Virginia: Flat Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Judy Gallagher, CC BY 2.0. The land is flat in the way only a coastal plain can be flat. From the sand of the barrier beaches in the east to the bay marshes in the west, the elevation rarely exceeds fifty feet above sea level. The soil is sandy and deep, ideal for the cotton, soybeans, vegetables, and truc...

Image: Judy Gallagher | CC BY 2.0

Eastern Shore of Virginia: The Railroad and the Tunnel

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dadadata, Public domain. Two pieces of infrastructure shaped the modern Eastern Shore. The first was the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad, built down the spine of the Delmarva Peninsula in the late 1880s and terminating at Cape Charles. It brought wealthy northern sportsmen to the barrier isla...

Image: Dadadata | Public domain

Eastern Shore of Virginia: Three Airports and the Quiet Highway

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Menzies from Morgantown, West Virginia, CC BY-SA 2.0. Three small airports dot the Shore. Accomack County Airport at Melfa is the largest, with a paved runway used by general aviation and the occasional medical flight. Campbell Field is a turf strip at Weirwood. Tangier Island has its own airport on the small fishing community in th...

Image: Tim Menzies from Morgantown, West Virginia | CC BY-SA 2.0