June D. MacArtor papers

June D. MacArtor was born to Thomas and Rosa Duboise in 1930 in Vanceboro, South Carolina. Raised in North Carolina, MacArtor attended the University of Tennessee where she received a bachelor’s degree in Sociology in 1949. She met Frank MacArtor at Tennessee, marrying him in 1948 before moving to Wilmington, Delaware, to raise a family. Frank’s job moved the family to California, where June received a certificate from the University of Southern California Pollution Control Institute. Before the family moved back to the Wilmington area, MacArtor realized a permanent pollution control job was closed to women at the time, prompting her to enroll in law school at Villanova University Law School. MacArtor received her law degree and was admitted to the Delaware Bar in 1974, becoming one of the first 25 women lawyers admitted to the Delaware Bar.

After graduation, MacArtor took a position in the Attorney General’s office, Department of Natural Resources. In that office, she not only helped establish Delaware’s environmental management codes and policies, but also defended the landmark Coastal Zone Act. MacArtor’s primary roles were creating environmental regulations and building court cases to establish a code of environmental law for the state of Delaware. She served as the Chief of the Environmental Law Group for Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) in the 1980s before retiring in 1990 as the Deputy Director of the Delaware Division of Air and Waste Management.

MacArtor was also a key figure in her community. MacArtor served as president of the Wilmington League of Women Voters, and was a longtime advisory board member of The Wilmington Women in Business and the Mid-Atlantic Environmental Law Center Advisory Council. She spent over twenty years on the New Castle County Planning Board and volunteered with the Delaware Nature Society in her spare time. After her retirement in 1990, MacArtor began serving on the boards of the local chapter of the Air and Waste Management Association, the Delaware Nature Society, and the Brandywine-Christiana Rivers Task Force. MacArtor passed away on June 13, 2013, at the age of eighty-three, leaving a legacy of environmental advocacy.