If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then how many words are 380,000 pictures worth?

We’ll give you the easy answer (because we’re writers, not math people, and 380,000,000 is a big number) – it’s a lot.

For over 40 years, from 1953 to 1998, Joe Jordan documented Greenville’s growth + important events from behind the camera, and after his passing in 2009 at the age of 86, his family donated his body of work – negatives, slides, and prints – to the Greenville County Historical Society (GCHS).

A small example of what the volunteer team with the GCHS has to sort through | Photo by GVLtoday team

Joe graduated from Parker High School in 1940 and went onto work at the Monaghan Textile Mill after graduation. He also served in the Philippines as a member of the US Army during WWII. Back in Greenville, he was a member of the Greenville City Police Department, a Greenville News newspaper photographer, a reporter and photographer with WSPA TV and radio, the Greenville County Deputy Coroner, a Greenville city councilman, and Mayor Pro-tem. With his son, Doug Jordan, Joe also owned and operated Joe F. Jordan Photography for over 50 years.

Nowadays, we don’t think too much about aerial photography with the invention and popularity of drones, but back when Joe owned his photography business, he would hire pilots and go up in a plane to take pictures of Greenville’s growing skyline.

Bell Tower under construction at Furman University in 1964 (with ducks of course) | Photo via the Joe Jordan collection at the Greenville County Historical Society

GCHS has about 3,000 photos from the Joe Jordan collection that they are working to get online (and available for purchase). Wondering what happened to the thousands of other photos we mentioned above? Some are unidentified and some are gruesome snapshots of car accidents and other deaths Joe examined and photographed as the Deputy Coroner for Greenville County.

Dedication of the “new” Greenville Spartanburg Airport on November 5, 1962 | Photo via the Joe Jordan collection at the Greenville County Historical Society

From Furman University to the Swamp Rabbit railroad and protests to presidential visits, there are so many wonderful photographs in this collection that will join the ranks of the GCHS’s Coxe Collection, Landing Collection, and Elrod Collection. You may even recognize yourself or a family member in some photos.

Oh snap. 📸 Check out more photos from the Jordan collection online here.