Her Stepmother Threw Her Out at 16 — She Dug Into a Hillside and Built Beautiful Underground Garden

It was a bitter winter evening in 1937 when Colleen Wear was cast out into the cold. At fourteen years old, she found herself standing on the frozen mud of her father’s yard, her entire life contained within a flower sack—a sack that held two dresses, a pair of stockings with holes at the heels, a comb missing half its teeth, and a tattered book titled The Practical Gardener. The thermometer nailed to the porch post read 19°, a cruel reminder of the harshness that had become her reality.

Behind her, through the frosted kitchen window, she could see the amber glow of the oil lamp. Her stepmother, Ida, was already turning away, as though Colleen had never existed at all. Her father had died of pneumonia six weeks earlier, leaving behind a woman who was more interested in securing her own future than in showing any compassion toward the orphaned girl.

“You set one foot back on this property,” Ida had said, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, her voice firm and unyielding, “and I’ll have the sheriff take you to the county home. Your father left this house to me. It’s written down legal. There’s nothing here that belongs to you anymore.”

Colleen’s father, Walter, had married Ida only 18 months prior to his death, not out of love, but necessity. He was a dying man in need of help, and Ida needed a roof over her head. It was a cold arrangement, and Colleen had never quite fit into the household. From the very beginning, Ida had viewed her as an inconvenience—an odd, quiet girl with too many questions about soil and plants, a girl who resembled her dead mother more than Ida cared to acknowledge.

Ida had made it clear from the start that Colleen’s interests in books and gardens had no place in the world she was supposed to inherit. “What good are books and gardens to a girl who needs to find a husband or a factory job?” she’d told Colleen’s father one evening at supper. The words had stung, but Walter, too sick to defend his daughter, had remained silent.

Now, with Walter gone, there was no one left to protect Colleen from Ida’s cruelty. She was discarded like an unwanted object. And yet, as she stood there in the yard, her thin coat barely protecting her from the frigid cold, Colleen did not cry. She made a choice that night—standing in the yard, breath forming in white clouds—she would not waste her energy on tears. She was a girl with no family, no place to go, but she was not broken. She would survive.

With nothing but the sack of belongings, she turned her back on the house and walked away, away from the place that had once been home. She knew the road ahead of her would be treacherous, but it was the only way forward. The road that led away from town, away from the people who had turned their backs on her, would take her uphill, into the dark woods that lined the hollow.

Colleen knew these hills like the back of her hand. Her mother had taught her the names of the plants, how to identify the wild ginger and morel mushrooms that grew in the spring. Her mother had filled her head with knowledge about the earth and the seasons. But now, her mother was gone, and Colleen was alone in the world, except for the lessons of the earth that had been instilled in her from the time she could walk.

Three miles up the old logging road, past the boulder the locals called the Devil’s Tooth, was Hadley’s Hollow. Colleen had heard the story of Ezekiel Hadley, a man who had tried to homestead there in the 1890s. He had cleared a patch of forest and dug a root cellar into the hillside before a falling tree ended his life. His wife had moved away, and the county had seized the land for taxes. No one wanted it. Colleen knew that it had been abandoned, but she had a feeling that this forsaken patch of land might be her refuge.

By the time she reached Hadley’s Hollow, it was well past midnight. The root cellar was still there, tucked into the hillside, a rectangle of earth framed with hand-cut sandstone blocks. The timber door had long rotted away, and the interior was dark and musty. But it was out of the wind, and it was shelter. Colleen crawled inside, gathering dead leaves and stuffing them into the corners to create a makeshift bed. She draped the two dresses over herself, huddled beneath the thin coat, and tried to sleep. But sleep did not come easily.

The cold was relentless, and her body ached from the climb and the exhaustion. But in that small, damp hole, she found something. The back wall of the root cellar, the wall that dug deepest into the hillside, was warm—almost imperceptibly so. It radiated a steady, patient heat, a warmth that was not from the air but from the earth itself. It was around 55° inside, a constant temperature that never wavered, no matter how cold the air outside became.

Colleen pressed her hands against the stone wall, feeling its steady heat. It reminded her of something her mother had said years ago as they knelt together in the garden: The earth wants to give you things, Colleen. You just have to learn how to ask it properly.

That night, Colleen made a decision. The cold and the hunger might have been unbearable, but she would not let this place, this hill, be the end of her. She would use the earth to survive, to build a future, just as her mother had taught her.

For the first few weeks, Colleen survived on what the land offered. She foraged for dried berries, the inner bark of birch trees, and a cache of black walnuts she found in a squirrel’s hollow log. She found wild onions along the creek and ate them raw. She melted snow in a rusted tin can and drank water so cold it made her teeth ache. Every day, her body grew weaker. She lost weight she could not afford to lose. Her ribs became visible beneath her thin skin, and her fingers cracked and bled, refusing to heal.

But she didn’t stop. Every day, despite the hunger and the cold, she worked. She worked on the root cellar. She cleared out the debris—dead leaves, stones that had shifted over time, and the rotted remains of the original door. She stacked the sandstone blocks, repaired the structure, and began to dig. She extended the root cellar deeper into the hillside, determined to create a place where she could grow food. Colleen had no experience in construction, no knowledge of engineering, but what she had was instinct, stubbornness, and the illustrations she had studied in The Practical Gardener. She knew there was a way to make this work.

The design Colleen followed was based on the principles of the Imara people of South America, who had built structures called walapinis—pit greenhouses. The principle was simple: by digging into a south-facing hillside, you created a growing space insulated on three sides by the earth. The open south-facing wall could be covered with glass, allowing sunlight to enter and trapping warmth inside. The steady, cool temperature of the earth would prevent the interior from freezing, even in the harshest winter months.

Every day, Colleen worked from first light until her arms could no longer lift the shovel. Some days, she moved only a few shovels of dirt before her body refused to continue. Other days, driven by a fury she couldn’t explain, she worked tirelessly, her hands raw and bleeding. By the end of February, she had dug a space roughly 12 feet wide, 20 feet long, and 7 feet deep. The floor was terraced in two broad levels, each 18 inches lower than the one before it. She lined the walls with stacked stones and used red clay as mortar. She built low retaining walls along each terrace to form planting beds.

The roof was the most challenging part. She felled small pines and used them as rafters, layering them with pine branches, red clay, and sod. The roof was heavy, but it worked. The south-facing wall remained open, covered only with a rough curtain of woven bark, allowing sunlight to pour into the space. Colleen had created a greenhouse, a space where she could grow food during the coldest months of the year. And it worked.

By March, the temperature inside the greenhouse stayed consistently above freezing, even on the coldest nights. The walls absorbed the sun’s warmth during the day and released it at night, maintaining a steady, comfortable temperature. Colleen planted her first seeds—lettuce, spinach, radishes, turnips, collard greens, and a handful of precious tomato seeds Opel had saved for her.

Within a week, the first shoots appeared, pushing up through the dark soil like tiny hands reaching for the light. Within a month, the greenhouse was covered in rows of seedlings. Colleen sat on the earth floor, a bowl of young lettuce leaves in her lap, and tasted the fresh greens. It was the first fresh food she had tasted in months, and it broke something open inside her. She wept, not out of sadness or relief, but out of wonder. She had done it. She had built something from nothing.

The greenhouse, the underground garden, thrived. The earth responded to Colleen’s labor. The vegetables grew quickly, more quickly than she could have imagined. Colleen expanded the space, adding side chambers and building an irrigation system from a diverted spring. Word began to spread through the community.

The first outsider to visit was Harlon Combmes, who ran the general store in Frametown. He came in September 1937, driven by curiosity, and what he found stopped him cold. Colleen led him into the greenhouse, where he was greeted by the smell of fresh earth and growing things. Tomato plants climbed the walls, lettuce and kale filled the terraces, and dried herbs hung from the rafters. Harlon stood in the middle of the greenhouse for a full minute before saying, “I’ll be damned.” And then, “How much of this can you sell me?”

That question marked the beginning of Colleen’s enterprise. Through the fall and winter of 1937 and into 1938, Colleen supplied Harlon’s store with fresh vegetables when every other garden in the valley was frozen solid. The people who had once written off Colleen now sought her out, eager to buy food that was fresh and alive, food that no one else could provide in the middle of winter.

The money was modest, but it was enough. Colleen bought proper tools, more glass, and seed stock. She ordered agricultural bulletins from the state extension service, teaching herself soil chemistry, companion planting, and cold-climate techniques. With Opel’s encouragement, Colleen bought herself a coat that fit and leather boots that would last the winter.

By 1939, Colleen had three separate underground chambers, an outdoor summer garden, eight chickens, and two dairy goats. At sixteen, she was entirely self-sufficient. But Colleen’s work didn’t stop there. She began to teach others—neighbors who had once mocked her. She showed them how to build their own underground gardens, how to plant and grow food when the world above ground was frozen.

By 1940, Colleen was holding weekly sessions at her hillside garden, teaching anyone who wanted to learn. Her knowledge spread from hollow to hollow, ridge to ridge. The techniques she had pioneered became a beacon of hope for the valley’s residents, who had struggled through the hardships of the Great Depression.

In 1941, Opel Scaggs passed away peacefully at the age of 75. Colleen buried her beneath a dogwood tree and planted wildflowers around her grave. Opel had been her protector, her teacher, and the closest thing to family she had. When Opel died, she left Colleen her land, 63 acres of forested hillside and a treasure trove of knowledge.

The war came in December 1941, and the valley’s women, old men, and children who remained needed food more than ever. Colleen’s underground gardens, built by people she had taught, became vital. She organized seed-saving cooperatives, helped build community root cellars, and wrote a pamphlet called Growing Underground: A Hill Country Guide that she distributed widely.

It was during this time that Colleen encountered Ida again. Ida’s second husband had left her, and the house on Barlo Creek was falling apart. Colleen, now a successful woman in her own right, met Ida at her greenhouse in November 1943. Ida stood at the entrance, silent, as she took in what Colleen had built. Finally, she said, “I didn’t know.” It wasn’t an apology, but an admission of surprise.

Colleen could have turned her away, but she didn’t. She had learned through years of digging and building that bitterness was a frost that killed things. She had survived, and she would not let bitterness take root.

In 1947, Colleen married Thomas Alford, a quiet man who had returned from the war with a shattered hand. He joined Colleen in her work, helping expand the operation. Together, they grew the seed library and developed the community teaching center.

By the 1950s, Colleen’s hillside was home to over a dozen interconnected underground chambers, a thriving seed library, and a teaching center. Her work was recognized by the state extension service, and her methods were adopted across Appalachia.

Colleen’s legacy was a living, breathing testament to resilience, to the power of curiosity, and to the refusal to give up. By the time she died in 1999, at the age of 76, her work had transformed the region. The underground gardens of Braxton County, now a thriving community, were a symbol of what can happen when we refuse to give up on the earth—and on ourselves.