Dean Holland was a former National Merit Scholar who enlisted in the army in 1968, and studied Vietnamese at the Defense Language Institute in California. Dean was re-assigned to the Army Medical Corps when he expressed concerns to his commanding officers about the morality of the war.

Soon after Dean arrived in Fayetteville, he decided to become a conscientious objector and appealed to the local branch of his own religious faith to assist him in developing his CO application. With many members in the military, the local Unitarians were divided about how to respond to his request. Bruce Pulliam, a history professor at Methodist College in Fayetteville, a founding Quaker House Board member, and now the clerk of the Fayetteville Friends Meeting, was attending the Unitarian Fellowship at the time and suggested that Dean visit Chapel Hill Meeting.

Dean took Bruce’s advice and hitch-hiked 60 miles to Chapel Hill one Thursday evening that June to ask the meeting for business to help him and the other soldiers at Ft. Bragg. A few weeks later, with help from the Durham and Raleigh meetings and the Piedmont Friends Fellowship, North Carolina Friends had scraped up enough money to rent a barely habitable house at 324 Ray St. near downtown Fayetteville, across from the VFW hall, and pay a meager salary to its staff.

Several months after Friends arrived in Fayetteville, Dean Holland became the first CO at Ft. Bragg and director of Quaker House. Tragically, Dean and assistant director Kaye Lindsey were killed in an auto-mobile accident on December 31, 1969.

Bob Gwyn is a former Clerk of Chapel Hill Meeting and a member of the Quaker House Board of Overseers since its founding. Bob, who was present when Dean stood and spoke to Chapel Hill Friends, remembers that as he spoke at the meeting,

"Holland challenged us to live up to our beliefs. He certainly wasn’t soft-spoken. He thought Quakers should be in Fayetteville."

Bob says that in the beginning, none of its founders thought Quaker House would be around for one, let alone 25 years. "We thought we could come up with some money to keep Quaker House open through that [first] summer," Bob says. "But there were so many GIs who needed our help, and the antiwar movement really started to heat up." Then, as now, Quaker House squeaked by on contributions from individual Friends, monthly and yearly meetings, and other supporters.

Gwyn also remembers that not all Quakers thought helping COs was a good idea. "When we started, Quaker House was not universally popular among North Carolina Friends. It was just too radical," he says. North Carolina Yearly Meeting (FUM) declined to support Quaker House, as did some FGC and FUM-affiliated monthly meetings in the region.