Major deltas and their adjacent coastal plains are commonly linked by means of coast-parallel fluxes of water, sediment, and nutrients. Observations of the evolution of these interlinked systems over centennial to millennial timescales are essential to understand the interaction between point sources of sediment discharge (i.e., deltaic distributaries) and adjacent coastal plains across large spatial (i.e., hundreds of kilometres) scales. This information is needed to constrain future generations of numerical models to predict coastal evolution in relation to climate change and other human activities. Here we examine the coastal plain adjacent to the Mississippi River Delta, one of the world’s largest deltas. We use a refined chronology based on 22 new optically stimulated luminescence and 22 new radiocarbon ages to test the hypothesis that cyclic Mississippi subdelta shifting has influenced the evolution of the adjacent Chenier Plain (CP). We show that over the past 3 kyr, accumulation rates in the CP were generally 0–1 MT yr<sup>−1</sup>. However, between 1.2 and 0.6 ka, when the Mississippi River shifted to a position more proximal to the CP, these rates increased to 2.9 ± 1.1 MT yr<sup>−1</sup> or 0.5–1.5 % of the total sediment load of the Mississippi River. We conclude that CP evolution during the past 3 kyr was partly a direct consequence of shifting subdeltas, in addition to changing regional sediment sources and modest rates of relative sea-level rise. These findings have implications for Mississippi River sediment diversions that are currently being planned to restore portions of this vulnerable coast. Only if such diversions are planned in the western portion of the Mississippi Delta Plain they could potentially contribute to sustaining the CP shoreline.