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 30, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 30 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 · 90 events
People: William Tryon
A log dwelling now called the Paisley-Rice Log House went up in western Orange County near Mebane, probably for the Rev. William D. Paisley after he bought the 200-acre tract from James Davis on February 7, 1801. It is one of the few county log houses already on the National Register by 1993.
Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House
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.
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.
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
The settlement that grew along the North Carolina Railroad from 1854 was incorporated in 1881 and shortened its name to Mebane in 1883. Part of the town lies in Orange County.
Subject: North Carolina Railroad
Foxes Knob School opened in the mid-1880s in a single log room. It gained a frame addition about 1900 and was later turned into a house.
After fire destroyed the academic buildings and dormitories at the Mebane campus in December 1890, Robert Bingham moved the school to Asheville in 1891. Owen W. Bingham ran a separate school, the William Bingham School, at the Mebane site.
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.
A year after the United Holy Church congregation organized, it put up its chapel, seating about 200, with thirty-five members and Rev. B. F. Alston as first pastor.
In 1927 the 130-acre farm long tied to the log house was split in settling Robert Rice's estate. The house kept a 65-acre share, later owned by his grandson Joseph A. Rice.
Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House
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.
Worried that growing numbers of western Orange children rode Alamance buses to Mebane schools, the board released to Alamance all children living within a mile of the county line and let those farther out stay if they chose. It also allowed out-of-county attendance if families paid tuition and provided transportation.
The Paisley-Rice Log House was entered in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, one of six rural Orange County properties on the Register by July 1993.
Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House
The A & M Grill, run by three generations of the McAdams family, served its last meals at 401 East Center Street. Co-founder George Crawford Amick died three weeks later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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