Effie Murray White was born on September 30, 1880, to Josh and Sally (Holt) Murray, former slaves owned by Andrew and Eli Murray on the Murray plantation in the Cross Roads community on Highway 119 in northern Alamance County.  She and her husband Charles worked as tenants on the Murray farm, as did their six children.  Effie was a faithful member of Kimes Chapel Baptist Church but occasionally attended events at Cross Roads Presbyterian Church.

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 As the matriarch of the large African-American branch of the Murray family and the possessor of an uncanny memory, she was regarded as the expert on her family’s history, able to recall generations of her family members’ birth and death dates, marriages, children, and other events in their lives.  She was widely known and revered in her community, but late in her life after author Alex Haley visited her on a 1974 journey to Alamance County attempting to complete his massive family history, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, she achieved national fame.

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Augustus Nickolas Bartis, his older brother, and their sister were among the millions of East European immigrants who came to America in the early twentieth century seeking a better life.  Born in Greece, he was only sixteen years old when he and his brother Komos passed through Ellis Island in 1910.  They lived for awhile with their sister Bessie in Elmira, New York. Gus, as he was always known, worked in several restaurants in New York City and North Carolina before moving to Mebane in the early 1930s, where he and his wife Katie settled and spent the rest of their lives. 

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With only $200 in their pockets and the Depression in full bloom, Gus and Katie opened the popular City Cafe near the corner of Center and Fourth Street and ran it for several years, working long hours six days a week. Gus later ran the little town’s bus station on Center Street, then a billiards parlor where Rice’s Jewelry is today.  As his business grew, he moved to a larger new building on West Highway 70 and worked there until his deteriorating health forced him to retire. 

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Born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1920, Clara Iseley Jones graduated from the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.  She served as a medical missionary in the Philippines and as a physician for  the C. and O. Railroad before moving to Mebane, where she married Mebane postman and former minor league baseball player T.D. Jones.

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In 1956 she joined the Mebane Clinic as the first female doctor in town, working with Dr. George McLamb and Dr. George Bullard in the popular medical facility that was the medical center for part of the counties of Alamance, Orange, and Caswell. The clinic served as a mini-hospital, seeing close to 60 patients a day, providing care for minor medical problems, performing minor surgeries, delivering babies, and operating a nursery. Newborn children and their mothers received overnight care, as did some other patients.

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