Dean Holland and The Beginnings of Quaker House
Fayetteville and Ft. Bragg issued its first challenge to Quakers in 1969, in the form of a young Unitarian from Omaha, Nebraska.
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.
Dean Holland and The Beginnings of Quaker House, continued
Times have changed, however, and Bob likes to point out that Quaker House currently enjoys the financial support of a variety of North Carolina yearly meetings, many unprogrammed and programmed monthly meetings throughout the country, as well as several Friends fellowships and yearly meetings.
Over the years, this unique effort of Friends and other peacemakers has had remarkable moments. On May 16, 1970, Quaker House joined Vietnam Vets Against the War to hold the largest antiwar rally in Fayetteville’s history. Hundreds turned out, including many GI’s dressed in wigs and sunglasses to avoid detection by military police. Four days later, Quaker House was destroyed by fire in an apparent case of arson.
The case was never solved and local authorities showed little interest in investi-gating. Previously unknown or ignored zoning restrictions were invoked to prevent repair of the house, and Quaker House staff began a search for new quarters.
Meanwhile, from May to October, with no house to use, the board, as well as the worship group which had sprung up soon after Quaker house’s founding, met out of doors amidst the ashes of the burned building. Many who attended those meetings recall army intelligence officers parked across the street monitoring Friends’ silent reflection.
Ultimately, Quaker House solved its real estate problem with the assistance of the GI Bill. Bill Carothers, an ex-soldier from Fort Bragg, purchased a house in Fayetteville, the one-time home of former N.C. Governor and U.S. Senator Terry Sanford, with a VA loan.
In November 1970, Quaker House paid Carothers the equity he had in the house and assumed the mortgage.
Quaker House as “Catalyst,” April, 1970
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While it would be difficult to think of a place more hostile to Quakers than Fayetteville, Quaker House cofounder Bob Gwyn thinks there are few places better for Quakers to pitch their tent—not only because helping soldiers is good for the world, but because it’s good for Quakers.
“Friends like to think that they are nice, peaceful, open-minded people who don’t like conflict and try to avoid it.” Too often in Friends ministries, he says, Quakers fail to “be involved in the lives of people who are quite different from us. Fayetteville is not a community that’s favorable to things Quaker House stands for. It’s not easy to embrace people who resolve conflict through violence. And that’s exactly what Quaker House does.”
Just as Dean Holland challenged Quakers 25 years ago, Gwyn says, Fayetteville and Ft. Bragg “presents a challenge to Friends to try to figure out how we can communicate to these people that we have a message for them. The message is not that we are peaceful and you are not, but that there is another way.”
– Adapted from an article by Rob Lamme, in Friends Journal, October 1994
Welcome To
Quietly, patiently, Bruce Pulliam, then a history professor at Methodist College in Fayetteville and a founding board member of Quaker House, collected and preserved this documentary record of the extraordinarily rich and turbulent chapter of the history of Fayetteville and Ft. Bragg that was the Vietnam era GI Resistance. 
