In the 1800s, poor white tenant farmers settled in the area. A third faction suggests that onion was once slang for “uneducated.” Others say it’s because people there smelled like onions. Some believe it’s a derivation of Youngintown, on account of people in the settlement having so many children. No one, not even the residents of the settlement, can definitively say where Oniontown’s peculiar name originated. Even Dover’s post office, less than a mile away, doesn’t consider Oniontown to be worthy of receiving mail. Historically, Oniontowners seem to have always been thought of as somehow “less than” people in Dover-gap-toothed hillbillies who dwell in a kind of medieval mountain darkness. In Dover Plains, the very word Oniontown causes people to frown, as if confronted with a foul smell or some unpleasant, long-repressed memory. While in the past 100 years women attained suffrage, segregation was ended, and civil rights were established that protected minorities, the century-old stigma toward Oniontown has remained remarkably intact. There are stories about people throwing onions onto the court when the local high school basketball team plays away games. Residents have a hard time finding jobs in town because of their addresses. The settlement has a notorious reputation that conjures up words like hillbilly, inbred, and drugs. Despite its name, Oniontown isn’t an actual town-it’s more of a mountainside enclave filled with a haphazard collection of run-down trailers on a dead-end dirt road. Another lies an hour and a half north of New York City outside the bucolic little Hudson Valley hamlet of Dover Plains. There are certain places that, by their very nature, seem forsaken. Dick Smith, known as the "Grandfather" of Oniontown, breeds pigs in order to sell them for slaughter. Dick with his grandsons, closing his makeshift pig pen for the season as winter approaches.
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