For decades, Conway worked mostly alone, crafting a one-of-a-kind underground home into a Missouri Ozarks mountainside — no permits, no architect, just him and his son growing up right alongside him, and an occasional friend.

Conway was an engineer who spent his career in the region's lead mining industry and never lost his fascination with trains — and he put both to work here. He dug straight down into the hillside and sealed it behind a foot of steel-reinforced concrete, then engineered a ventilation system that draws air through the surrounding earth to cool the house in summer and warm it in winter. At the entrance, a single wall of hand-welded framing holds the glass that catches the light like the mouth of a cave.

Before any of that, Conway had already spent years living underground, serving on four-man Air Force crews in Titan II nuclear missile silos. Whether that's where the idea came from, even his son isn't certain. Conway never said.

Inside, the house feels like a mine shaft crossed with a railroad depot, with rough-sawn oak timbers and kerosene railroad lanterns throughout. Elsewhere on the property is a homemade airboat powered by an aircraft engine. The first thing visitors see as they drive in is a 58,000-pound vintage railroad caboose resting on its own hand-laid track, where he had craned it into place piece by piece.

Conway passed away in 2018. His son, Zane, has spent years restoring the underground home - room by room - the same way it went up the first time. He's also slowly restoring and continuing the builds on the rest of the property: 225 acres of private wilderness in the St. Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri.

Fifty years after the first shovel of earth came out of that hillside, it still hasn't leaked. Once you see how he engineered it, you'll understand exactly why.

—Zane's channel: https://youtube.com/@TerreHome-Retreat?si=h64ye1EsOELxE7Y5

On *faircompanies: https://faircompanies.com/videos/visionary-dad-built-underground-home-son-restored-it-to-former-glory/