Dottie Martin

Dorothy Ann "Dottie" Martin (née McAulay) was born on 21 January 1937 in Charlotte, North Carolina, to Benson Wood McAulay and Dorothy Louise Gill McAulay. She grew up in North Carolina and South Carolina, attended Queens College and the University of South Carolina with early plans for Christian education work in the Presbyterian Church, and met her future husband, James G. Martin, at a Presbyterian youth conference. They married on 1 June 1957.

While James completed a doctorate at Princeton University, Dottie worked in Princeton's Industrial Relations Department. In 1960 the couple moved to Davidson, North Carolina, where he taught chemistry at Davidson College and she taught kindergarten until 1972. They raised three children: James Grubbs Martin Jr. (born 1959), Emily Wood Martin (born 1962), and Arthur Benson Martin (born 1972). During her husband's twelve years in the U.S. House of Representatives, the family lived in Washington, D.C., and she later worked for seven years as a real-estate broker once the children were in school.

When James G. Martin was elected governor of North Carolina, Dottie served as First Lady from 5 January 1985 to 9 January 1993. She made child welfare and family stability the center of her public work. After learning about Parent to Parent at a National Governors' Conference, she helped establish chapters in seventy of North Carolina's one hundred counties and received a national award for that effort. She encouraged fingerprint resource stations for children in twenty-one localities, served on the Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse Among Children and Youth, and was appointed by her husband to chair the Commission on Child Victimization and the Commission on the Family.

Her other lasting civic imprint came from a trip observation. After seeing roadside wildflower plantings in Texas, she asked the North Carolina Department of Transportation whether similar beds could be cultivated along North Carolina highways. NCDOT began the wildflower program in 1985, later won a national award for it, and presented that recognition to Martin for inspiring the effort. Decades later the program remains one of the state's most visible public landscaping traditions.

At the North Carolina Executive Mansion she raised about 185,000 dollars, beginning with a Junior League of Raleigh grant, to re-landscape damaged grounds and restore the Victorian garden on the south lawn, rededicated to her on 27 May 1987. She started public garden tours and an informational brochure, helped create the nonprofit Executive Mansion Fund in 1988 (which raised more than two million dollars by the mansion's 1991 centennial), and pushed for a historical video, a book, and a curator's office. She also redecorated the Governor's Western Residence in Asheville with North Carolina arts and crafts, aided by foundation grants. She asked that former first lady Jeanelle C. Moore's portrait return to the Ladies Parlour in honor of Moore's Fine Arts Committee work.

After leaving Raleigh, the Martins lived in Charlotte and on Lake Norman. Dottie served on the Queens University of Charlotte board of trustees, the Thurston Arthritis Center board, and the advisory board of the Family Center for Abused and Neglected Children. A scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill was named for the couple, and the North Carolina Federation of Republican Women established the Dottie Martin Teachers Scholarship.

Dorothy Ann Martin died on 28 September 2026 at The Pines in Davidson, North Carolina, at the age of 89. Her family obituary remembered a loving wife, mother, grandmother, and friend who loved gardens, Lake Norman, reading, and making people feel welcome. Services were held at Davidson College Presbyterian Church on 3 October 2026. North Carolina ordered U.S. and state flags lowered to half-staff in her honor. She was survived by her husband, their three children and their spouses, and grandchildren including Kathren, James III, Carter, Rosalie, and Leo Barrett Martin.