Mebane: Furniture Town on the Railroad

Mebane sits astride the Alamance and Orange county line, and it owes its existence to a railroad and a family name. The North Carolina Railroad came through in the middle of the eighteen fifties, and that is when the community began to grow into something more than a crossroads farm stop. The town was incorporated in eighteen eighty-one as Mebanesville, named for Brigadier General Alexander Mebane, a North Carolina militia officer who served in the Revolutionary War and later sat in Congress during the seventeen nineties. The name was shortened to Mebane in eighteen eighty-three.

In that same year of incorporation, the White Furniture Company was organized, kicking off an industrial identity the town would hold for generations. Mebane became part of the dense furniture-manufacturing corridor that stretches across the North Carolina piedmont. Today the town is one of the faster-growing communities between Greensboro and Durham, filling in the corridor with warehouses and commuter subdivisions, though its Victorian-era downtown still remembers the railroad that started it all.