Community in Orange County
A city on the Alamance and Orange county line, incorporated in 1881 as Mebanesville and named for the Mebane family. The White Furniture Company, founded there the same year, made it a furniture town for a century.
Source: NCpedia, North Carolina Gazetteer
144 indexed works are connected with this place. 2 held at OCPL →
Themes here. The subjects the index files most often under Mebane.
Dated events connected with this place: sixteen of 46, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 46 dated events in the chronology →
Leaving Hillsborough on May 11, Tryon stopped on Sunday at Colonel Mebane's for divine service, then marched to the Haw River, where 23 mounted men under Captain Bullock joined as his only cavalry. He ordered his troops not to take property and reached Alamance Creek on May 14.
Part of The Regulator crisis, 1766–1771 · 116 events
People: William Tryon
Paisley left the Hawfields in 1818 to head the Greensborough Academy and in September 1819 sold the log house farm to Elijah Pickard. The chain of title is unclear for some years after the sale.
People: William D. Paisley
Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House
The North Carolina Railroad put a depot on the county line in 1854, and the settlement of Mebanesville, later Mebane, soon formed there.
Part of Railroads through Orange, 1849–1900 · 82 events
Subject: North Carolina Railroad
Elkins Pettigrew sold the farm to his son-in-law Robert K. Rice, husband of his daughter Martha, for $375 in 1869. Rice improved the place, which the 1880 census valued at $1,500, and it stayed in the Rice family for more than a century.
Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House
Charles White, who kept the store and post office at Bingham School near Mebane, died on Thursday, May 24, 1883. The Observer called him successful in business; his widow, Mary E. White, qualified as executrix of his will.
A volunteer company was organized at Bingham School to go to the World's Exposition at New Orleans in December and compete for the $3,000 prize offered to the best company.
Subject: Bingham School
A school post office in Orange County was discontinued, and mail for it was to be addressed to Mebane. The post office appears to be the one at Bingham School, which left for Asheville in 1891.
Subject: Bingham School
Herbert Bingham, principal of the Presbyterian High School at Mebane, dies of typhoid fever at his home there after ten weeks' illness, seven months after taking charge. His sister later gave a scholarship at the school in his memory.
Subject: Bingham School
Judge Hoke dissolved the injunction Col. Robert Bingham had sought and ruled that Preston Lewis Gray and the widow and children of Col. William Bingham were entitled to call their school the Bingham School. Col. Bingham was left free to use the name as well.
People: Robert Bingham
Subject: Bingham School
After a district election, the commissioners gave the sheriff a tax list for the Mebane district at 30 cents per $100 and 90 cents a poll. By 1910 special school taxes were collected in six districts.
Part of Building the public schools, 1868–1920 · 192 events
For $25 the Mebanes sold a 30-by-40-foot lot at the corner of Union Street, opposite the later Central High School, to trustees Elisha Williams and Arthur Hood. The chapel was named in their memory.
The congregation later called Mebane Congregational Christian Church was organized on May 16, 1915, with W. C. Clements, pastor of the Christian church in Chapel Hill, as first pastor. Its building was finished in 1931.
The Orange County commissioners voted unanimously to keep refusing J. A. Thompson a license to sell beer at his filling station, the Log Cabin, on the Mebane road. Thompson and his wife called it a "Dirty Deal" and their lawyer pleaded for another chance without success.
The National Register Advisory Committee placed the Paisley-Rice log house near Mebane on North Carolina's Study List, its list of properties likely to qualify for the National Register.
Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House
The National Endowment for the Arts named Thompson, a fiddler from Mebane, a 2007 National Heritage Fellow for the African American string band music of the North Carolina Piedmont.
The Buckhorn Flea Market on Buckhorn Road in western Orange County, known to many Spanish speakers as La Pulga de Mebane, closed after about four decades when a trucking company bought the land. Its 300 to 500 weekend vendors were largely Latino immigrants, and the Mebane City Council voted on July 1 to annex and rezone the property for a truck terminal.
Dated maps that show this place, oldest first: town plans, county, road and soil maps, fire insurance sheets and the U.S. Geological Survey’s topographic maps, each linked to the library or archive that holds it. The USGS maps are free to download.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina, the most widely held first, novels aside. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Narrow these works. Each link opens the search already limited to this place. Counts are indexed works, not copies on a shelf; a work can carry more than one period or place.
George Wynder Thompson's memoir of growing up during segregation in Orange and Alamance counties, around Cedar Grove, Mebane and Burlington. Thompson worked as a sharecropper and later for Burlington Industries. Published in 2013 by Brentwood Christian Press.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the DigitalNC record: Mebane (N.C.).
Two volumes from the Bingham Military School at Asheville, covering 1872 to 1876 and 1890 to 1919, part of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. The volumes concern the earlier Bingham School in Orange County, Robert Bingham, 1838 to 1927, debating societies and the history of schools in North Carolina.
Why this is here: The record names this place alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
About 600 family letters of Thomas Lynch, a Presbyterian minister in the Orange Presbytery, and his wife Mary Bingham Lynch, with dates beginning in 1794. There is material on their son W. B. Lynch, who ran an academy at High Point, and on Major Robert Bingham, head of the Bingham School in Orange County. Topics also include Lemuel Lynch and silversmith and jewelry work. At Duke's Rubenstein Library.
Why this is here: The record names this place alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Family papers of the Mebanes and Faucettes spanning 1782 to 1908, about fifty items in half a linear foot in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5280. Topics include militia officers and their records during the Civil War, the North Carolina Railroad Company, Presbyterian church history, slavery, and family life in the state. Orange County and the town of Mebane are the places named.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: North Carolina -- Mebane.
Series 1.2 of the Lenoir family papers, drawn from 13,200 items in 24.5 linear feet spanning 1763 to 1936 with a 1975 addition, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. Topics include courtship and the death of children in the nineteenth century, health resorts, railroads in North Carolina, medical study at Jefferson Medical College, and schooling at Salem Academy and the Bingham School in Orange County.
Why this is here: The record names this place alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Series 1.4 and 1.5 of the Lenoir family papers, part of a body of 13,200 items in 24.5 linear feet dated 1763 to 1936 with a 1975 addition, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. These series cover freed persons and African American migration, the General Assembly, real estate and the Linville Improvement Company, women's lives in the South, and schooling under William Bingham.
Why this is here: The record names this place alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Recently indexed: Giles Mebane (1900) · Memorial Hall : its tablets and memories : acceptance of tablets memorializing Col. Robert Bingham, Ambassador Robert Worth Bingham and Senator Matt W. Ransom (1939) · Field day ; Franklin Street (1934) · Special circular : Bingham School ... May 31st, 1879. (1879) · Welcome to the 5th annual Eno-Occaneechi powwow, August 11-12, 1989, Mebane, N.C. (1989) · The Alamance-Orange enterprise. (1991)
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this place. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled.
J. Ronald Oakley's pictorial history of Mebane, the railroad town on the Orange and Alamance county line, from Arcadia Publishing in 2012, 127 pages of photographs. Chapters cover the railroad, industries, businesses, the Depression and war years, profiles past and present, churches and civic clubs, recreation and sports, school days, and preserving the past. Topics include Mebane's history, economy, buildings and railroads.
Photographs by Bill Bamberger and text by Cathy N. Davidson record the last months of the White Furniture Company of Mebane, a family firm founded in 1881, sold to Hickory Manufacturing in 1985 and closed in 1993, when more than 200 people lost their jobs. Davidson follows six people who worked there, from the chief executive to a laborer. Published in 1998 by Duke's Center for Documentary Studies with W. W. Norton, 223 pages.
The Mebane family came from Ireland to Pennsylvania early in the 1700s and moved on to North Carolina, where Alexander Mebane became the first sheriff of Orange County. Robert M. Mebane's account of the family was published by the author in 1999, 250 pages with maps, facsimiles, a genealogical table and an index, with an addendum sheet tipped in.
Turner and Thompson family lines, with the allied Allen, Clendenin, Craig, Mebane, Snipes and Steele families, compiled by Herbert S. Turner in 101 pages with a portrait; privately issued and dated 1938.
Resources picked for this place, each with a note on what it holds.
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