The wildflowers that color North Carolina's highway medians every spring, black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, crimson clover, trace back to an idea Dottie Martin would not let go of after she read a Wall Street Journal article about roadside plantings in Texas. Dorothy "Dottie" McAulay Martin, who served as North Carolina's First Lady from 1985 to 1993 alongside her husband, Governor James G. Martin, died September 28, 2026, at the Pines at Davidson. She was 89.

She was born January 21, 1937, in Charlotte, the daughter of Benson Wood McAulay Sr. and Dorothy Gill McAulay. She met James Grubbs Martin at a Presbyterian youth conference, and the two married on June 1, 1957, beginning a partnership that carried them from a chemistry classroom at Davidson College to the Executive Mansion in Raleigh. She studied at Queens College in Charlotte and the University of South Carolina, then worked in Princeton University's Industrial Relations department before the family settled in Davidson, where she taught kindergarten from 1960 to 1972 and later spent seven years as a real estate broker.

When her husband took office as governor in 1985, Martin brought the same practical instincts to the role of First Lady. The idea she had been turning over since that newspaper article found its outlet that same year, when the North Carolina Department of Transportation launched the roadside wildflower program at her urging. The department later gave her its own award for inspiring it, and the plantings she set in motion have continued along interstates and state highways for decades, maintained today across the state's 14 highway divisions and funded largely through revenue from personalized license plate sales.

Her more urgent work centered on protecting children. As chairwoman of the North Carolina Commission on Child Victimization and the Commission on the Family, she helped set up child fingerprinting identification stations in 21 communities statewide and brought the Parent to Parent program, aimed at preventing child abuse and neglect, into 70 of North Carolina's 100 counties, an effort that later earned a national award. "Without the support, concern, and love of the family," she wrote while leading the two commissions, "our children fail to receive the care and guidance they need to become well adjusted, responsible, and caring adults of the future."

She also reshaped the places where North Carolina's governors lived and worked. Martin raised $185,000 to redesign the Executive Mansion grounds and dedicated a restored Victorian garden on its south lawn on May 27, 1987. The following year she helped establish the nonprofit Executive Mansion Fund, which had raised more than $2 million toward the mansion's preservation by 1991, and she redecorated the Governor's Western Residence in Asheville using grants from the Janivre and Blumenthal foundations.

After leaving the Executive Mansion in 1993, Martin stayed close to the causes and the community that had shaped her, serving as a Life Member of the Board of Trustees at Queens University of Charlotte, as a trustee of Barium Springs Orphanage, and on the boards of the Thurston Arthritis Center and the Family Center for Abused and Neglected Children. She is survived by her husband, James Grubbs Martin Sr.; their three children, James Grubbs Martin Jr., Emily Martin Richey, and Arthur Benson Martin; five grandchildren; and her dog, Daisy.

Governor Josh Stein ordered United States and North Carolina flags at state facilities lowered to half-staff from October 1 through October 5, 2026, saying Martin "used her platform as First Lady to protect young people from sexual violence and alcohol and drug misuse and to beautify our state," according to the North Carolina Department of Administration. Current First Lady Anna Stein, in the same statement, recalled encountering the program's reach as a teenager: "I distinctly remember as a teenager when the wildflower program was started by First Lady Dottie Martin to beautify our highways." Martin served two full terms as North Carolina's First Lady, according to WFMY News 2. Funeral services were held October 3 at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, where the family had deep ties, according to Davidson College.

North Carolina's highway medians still fill with black-eyed Susans and coneflowers every spring because of the program she pushed the state to adopt. The Victorian garden she rebuilt still borders the Executive Mansion's south lawn, and the fund she helped start still pays for its upkeep. The fingerprinting stations and Parent to Parent chapters she carried into dozens of counties outlasted her two terms by decades, and a scholarship established in her name by the North Carolina Federation of Republican Women still sends students from the Davidson area into teaching, the same work she once did in a kindergarten classroom there.