Our Story

In 1949, two Graham County teenagers borrowed a car, filled it with axes and crosscut saws, and drove two other men more than 450 miles from Robbinsville, North Carolina, to Philadelphia, Mississippi. Seventeen-year-old Ted Phillips and his cousin Clyde had partnered on a $495 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) land clearing job. It was hot, exhausting manual labor, but despite the small scope, the team took pride in a job well done and netted a good profit. They didn’t know it at the time, but this laid the groundwork for P&J.

Three years later, Ted Phillips and Ted Jordan founded P&J, and carried this pioneering spirit through the 20th century. Our early construction efforts centered around clearing thousands of acres of land for the TVA throughout the Southeast. These smaller projects were manned by small crews with hand-felling equipment, and while they didn’t net much profit individually, the company did well overall. By 1959, P&J had proven to be resourceful and tenacious enough to begin expanding in earnest. 

The Flaming Gorge Reservoir took P&J out of the mountains of North Carolina and West to Wyoming. This 7,800-acre clearing project truly established us as a capable contractor and opened the door to larger bonding capacities in the future. Throughout the rest of the 20th century, we continued to grow by seeking ways to build on our land clearing experience and break into new markets. Building a new headquarters in Knoxville, Tennessee, as well as a regional office in Florida, made it easier to transport equipment on the interstate. Clearing evolved into site preparation for commercial and industrial projects and heavy earthwork on reservoirs. 

Today, P&J continues to grow while holding on to our Smoky Mountain roots. Ted Phillips, Sr. passed in 2018, but his legacy continues. His wife Avis Phillips, who has supported P&J from the beginning and ran her own construction company Avisco from 1982-2017, has taken over as the Chairman of the Board, making P&J a woman-owned business. She has overseen internal changes restructuring us into a national enterprise, and with generations of P&J employees, both old and new, we continue to take on new challenges.