[2] The archaeological findings suggest that during the Contact period, the area had become a village occupied by the lower orders of the Powhatan chiefdom with the structures conforming to Robert Beverley's description of bark covered buildings,[3] the smaller being shaped like beehives and larger having an oblong form.

[2] John Smith and William Hole's copper plate engraved map of Virginia shows that the village at Jordan's Point was still extant in 1607,[4][5] when the first English settlers arrived at Jamestown.

[6]: 13–14  By the end of the First Anglo-Powhatan War, the colonists under the command of Thomas Dale had removed the Native American presence in the area surrounding Jamestown.

[7] Sometime soon afterwards, the colonist Samuel Jordan,[8] who was also an ancient planter,[9] began cultivating the land, and in 1620 patented a 450-acre plantation,[9] The main residence was named "Beggars Bush",[note 1] a common place name in England with over 120 known instances[11] a play upon the then common reference that alludes to both a temporary shelter for the indigent and a path to ruin.

[13]: 47 In March of 1622, the Native Americans of the Powhatan Confederacy launched a surprise attack, known as the Jamestown Massacre, that killed nearly a third of the English colonists in Virginia.

[17]: 209–213 Following the massacre, the original residence gradually expanded into the complex at the Jordan-Farrar site, a palisaded fortification structured around five English longhouses.

[14]: 575 When Farrar became commissioner in 1626, it became the seat of the "Upper Partes"[sic], which included all settlements upstream from Jordan's Journey from the James River.

[30] Charles Andrews states that the rebellion started on Jordan's Point when Nathaniel Bacon took leadership over a group of insurgents there, who wanted to attack Native American settlements against the wishes of the colonial government.

[20]: 83  As evidence of this ongoing expansion, archaeologists also found the remains of a large, elaborate brickwork building "consistent with a Georgian sense of proportion" that had been started around 1760, but its construction appears to have come to a halt with the death of Richard Bland II in 1776 and it was in ruins after 1781, the year that the Virginia tidewater region was invaded by Benedict Arnold.

[20]: 80 When his father died, Richard Bland III inherited the property and moved inland, building a new residence about 1.5 miles south of the original plantation.

In 1977 the tanker ship S.S. Marine Floridian steaming downstream in the early morning hours collided with the Benjamin Harrison Bridge, when its steering gear malfunctioned.

[35] Today Jordan Point has a marina,[36] which is just north of the south footing of the Benjamin Harrison Bridge on the James River.