Photos by Nadia Shira Cohen
Dick
with his grandsons, closing his makeshift pig pen for the season as
winter approaches. Dick Smith, known as the "Grandfather" of Oniontown,
breeds pigs in order to sell them for slaughter.
There are certain places that, by their very nature, seem forsaken.
Afghanistan is one. Another lies an hour and a half north of New York
City outside the bucolic little Hudson Valley hamlet of Dover Plains.
It’s a place called Oniontown. 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. The settlement
has a notorious reputation that conjures up words like
hillbilly, inbred, and
drugs.
Residents have a hard time finding jobs in town because of their
addresses. There are stories about people throwing onions onto the court
when the local high school basketball team plays away games. 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.
In Dover Plains, the very word
Oniontown causes people to frown,
as if confronted with a foul smell or some unpleasant, long-repressed
memory. 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. “Subhuman,” as a few locals
put it. Even Dover’s post office, less than a mile away, doesn’t
consider Oniontown to be worthy of receiving mail.
No one, not even the residents of the settlement, can definitively say
where Oniontown’s peculiar name originated. Some believe it’s a
derivation of
Youngintown, on account of people in the settlement
having so many children. Others say it’s because people there smelled
like onions. A third faction suggests that
onion was once slang for “uneducated.”
In the 1800s, poor white tenant farmers settled in the area. The
earliest mention I could find of Oniontown appeared in the 1908 book
Historic Dover:
“One mile south of Dover Plains is a little settlement, composed of two
classes—males that don’t do anything and females that bring up the
children and take the business off the old man’s hands.” The little
smattering of trailers and homesteads seems to have always held an
inexplicable draw for outsiders. In 1947, International News Service
reporter James L. Kilgallen ventured up to Oniontown and penned a trio
of articles about the outpost with headlines like “Escape from Atomic
Age: Real Life Tobacco Road 100 Miles from Broadway,” “No Radio or Auto
Disturbs Hillbillies of Colony, a Century Behind Times,” and “Woman of
39 has 13 Children.” In his articles, Kilgallen made fun of Oniontowners
for being scared of cameras and not being well-versed in Shakespeare,
while simultaneously praising their simple, pastoral way of life:
“Picture a community without an electric light, without a radio, without
a movie house, without a bathtub, where the kiddies rarely get to
eighth grade in school, where illiteracy abounds… rough hard-bitten
Oniontown is primitive.”
In the final piece of his series, Kilgallen and his photographer drive
away from Oniontown, past lavish country estates, and the photographer
invokes the noble savage, saying, “I doubt if a lot of rich people who
live in those estates are happier than the people we saw in Oniontown.
You don’t find Oniontown worrying about income taxes or the atomic
bomb.” Twelve years later Kilgallen returned to the settlement for a
follow-up piece, brilliantly titled, “Quaint Oniontown Still Hides
Behind Its Patched Rag Curtain.” The community still didn’t have
electricity.
Ethel Smith with her great-grandson.
For most of its history, the residents of surrounding areas quietly
judged the Oniontowners but left them alone up on the mountain. “Most
locals know there’s no point in going up there,” a state police
investigator told me. But recently, the demographics of the region have
been changing. New York City homebuyers have plowed through Westchester
and Putnam into traditionally working-class Dutchess County, ever in
pursuit of cheaper, more bucolic upstate idylls. And in the past few
years, suburban youth have taken to venturing up to gawk at the
supposedly inbred hillbillies who’ve been popularized by urban myth. In
early 2008, a shaky video called “Oniontown Adventures” appeared on
YouTube. In it, three young jokers drive up a dirt road in an SUV at
dusk, pretending like they’re reenacting a scene from
Deliverance
while commenting on the “little inbred hick village.” A guy in the
backseat sarcastically says, “We’re gonna die.” The one in the passenger
seat raises a pickax and says, “I’m gonna take one of those fuckers
with me” as they blast twangy country music to pump themselves up. Once
they cross the invisible border into Oniontown, everything seems to take
on a preternatural significance. They roll down the windows and snap
cameraphone photos of the trailers and trash. One guy spots a chicken on
the dirt road and shouts, “Oh my God, look—a fucking chicken!” Then the
video begins to slow down as the camera zooms in on a shadowy figure
standing out in the woods. “That’s the sketchiest person I’ve ever seen
in my life,” one of the boys says. Another shouts, “Look, I think
there’s someone in the window!” This is followed by a couple
Blair Witch
slow-motion shots of other people standing in the woods. In the end,
nothing really happens except a few terrible jokes and even worse
laughter, concluding with one of the kids saying, “Didn’t they all look
dazed? It’s like they are oblivious to the rest of the world.”
Later that summer, perhaps inspired by the bro-trio’s now-popular
YouTube video, two teenagers from the wealthy town of Mahopac ventured
into Oniontown with a camcorder to poke fun at its residents. They
weren’t so lucky. Oniontowners wielding bricks and rocks attacked their
car, and both of them ended up in the hospital. The incident made
national news, adding to the place’s infamy. The situation was
exacerbated by state police investigator Eric Schaeffer’s ominous
warning to the press: “Anybody that doesn’t belong there, anybody that’s
not a resident, just stay out of Oniontown.”
All of the commotion only served to make people more interested.
Adventure-seeking teenagers, inspired by videos with titles like “A Day
in an Inbred Village” and “Return to Fishkill,” arrived in droves,
undeterred by the fact that their excursions had a good chance of being
followed by a trip to the ER. In one clip, a teenage interloper’s
camcorder points at the car’s floorboard, and all you can hear is girls
screaming at the top of their lungs: “Oh my God! Fuck off! Leave us
alone!” Below the clip, the video poster explained, “Some guy started
chasing us down the road in his car and they blocked me and threw a rock
at my windshield… these people are physco [
sic].”
Oniontown became a kind of real-life haunted house for bored suburban
teens, albeit one with serious consequences. One girl got a brick to the
side of her head. Car windows of Oniontown’s unwanted “fans” were
routinely smashed, their passengers dragged out and beaten. Others have
been chased around by cars full of Oniontowners, careening their
vehicles into trees or escarpments of rock while trying to escape.
Eventually, the local police contacted Google and had many of the videos
pulled off YouTube, but the damage had already been done. Oniontown had
gone viral. One police investigator told me, “Kids were coming from all
over—Westchester, Fishkill, Cortlandt Manor. When we would pull them
over they’d say they were lost, but they’d have Google Maps directions
to Oniontown in the backseat.”
Another investigator asked me, “What would you do if someone came into
your neighborhood and started doing donuts and making fun of where you
live and calling you names? People came in and messed with them, and so
they reacted and then other people reacted back and it just snowballed
from there. It wasn’t local kids. YouTube perpetuated it.”
Dick Smith's hunting rifle lies on the dining room table.
What lies at the heart of this dark star? What was the root of this
fascination and fear of rural poverty? Where does a bad reputation come
from? I set out to get some answers.
I started my journey in Poughkeepsie, a glum city in that upstate Rust
Belt sort of way. I met Betsy Kopstein Stuts, executive director of the
Dutchess County Historical Society, in a centuries-old house near the
center of the decayed and boarded-up downtown. Unpaid volunteers—elderly
gentlemen and college girls—circulated in and out of her dusty office,
looking like movie extras as they carefully catalogued centuries of
Poughkeepsie artifacts. Betsy sat on the other side of a massive desk
cluttered with papers, seeming bemused by my interest in so marginal a
place as Oniontown.
“We just don’t have a lot of facts. There are stories,” she said. What
kind of stories? “That they’re inbred. That they built a Planned
Parenthood nearby there in Dover because the girls out there were
getting pregnant at 12 and 13. That Oniontowners are ten to a house and
the police won’t go there. If you try to go out and talk to them,
they’ll slip out the back and scatter into the woods. You can rarely do
any interviewing with them or get any kind of story. That’s why there’s
so little known about them—they don’t let anyone in.”
I asked Betsy, a native of Poughkeepsie, what she had heard growing up.
“It was the kind of place you didn’t want to go at night,” she said.
“You went with a group, never alone. And you definitely didn’t go in
there unprotected.” Betsy explained that she believed the community had
chosen their own isolation—that they had shut themselves off to the
world and paid the price of stigmatization. “The relationship between
Dover and Oniontown is terrible to this day,” she continued, “If you
move into a neighborhood and there’s one person there who doesn’t mow
their lawn and doesn’t paint their house and leaves trash outside, how
do you feel about that person? You reflect and say, I wish that person
weren’t here.” But is it fair the way people talk about Oniontown? “No,
it’s definitely not fair. But can you stop people from talking? Can you
stop rumors? You just can’t.”
A No Trespassing sign for a gun club on Oniontown road.
My “access” to Oniontown originated with a common form of journalistic
chicanery—the friend of a friend. To be honest, I had some pretty
serious reservations about asking a group of people who had basically
fought a guerrilla war for their privacy if I could come up into their
homes to poke my nose around and ask them scrutinizing questions. But
somehow, as the journalist always does when thinking of the paycheck at
the end of the rainbow, I managed to suppress my misgivings and watched
my fingers dial the telephone number. To my surprise, Patty Smith and
her mother-in-law, Ethel, the oldest living resident and “Queen Bee” of
Oniontown, told me to come on up. By 11 AM, I was going up the infamous
dirt road to the settlement.
Just through the cattle gate, past a flurry of
NO TRESPASSING
signs, stood a burned-out house, like a warning: Beware all ye who
enter. The gnarled, charred husk of a structure had twisted into itself
like something from an Edvard Munch painting. Oniontown proper was just a
few steps ahead. It was as bleakly unimpressive as I had expected: just
a steep little dirt road pocked with a couple of trailers that
overlooked the entire valley—the Metro North train tracks, highway, and
cliffs beyond. A couple of little kids played in the junk-strewn dirt
yards. I told one of the little girls that I was looking for Ethel, and
she ran inside a trailer. A pit bull eyed me suspiciously from across
the road as I waited under the eaves. After a while, the door creaked
open to reveal a tough-looking kid, with a flat-brimmed hat and a big
belt buckle adorned with a marijuana leaf. “Ethel doesn’t want to talk
right now,” he said. “She’s not feeling good.” He glowered in my
direction.
I asked when I should return, and he shrugged and muttered something
about staying away from Oniontown, shutting the door in my face. I
walked up the stark little hill to Patty’s trailer, but no one was home.
After standing around on the dirt steppe for a bit, surveying the
nearby pit-bull kennels and skeletal mountain tree line, I headed back
to Dover to meet Renny Abrams, the town judge, at his bustling country
store and gas station. Abrams, kindly and white-haired, bore an uncanny
resemblance to an elderly Johnny Cash. He also had Cash’s nebulous
politics—after an hour of talking to him I couldn’t tell whether he was
right- or left-leaning. As a town judge and a business owner, he had a
lot of experience dealing with the Oniontowners.
Dick Smith’s pigs chowing down on some donuts.
“When I was a teenager they were always bullied,” he said. “I remember
experiencing some situations where a certain girl would be deemed ‘less
than accepted’ because of her Oniontown status. But they, more than
anybody, supported me when I started this store. They shopped here, they
were our friends—to this day I am indebted to them. They’re not looking
for something to set them higher in some social arena. They’re genuine.
They’re real.”
In small towns and insular communities, news spreads quietly and rumors
proliferate amid the shadows. Abrams described how isolated events that
were somehow related to Oniontown had stacked atop one another,
reinforcing people’s prejudices. “Someone gets arrested for
drugs—‘Oniontown is a drug den.’ Someone’s arrested for killing a deer
out of season—‘Oh, they’re lawless up there.’” In the end, he concluded,
it was unlikely that Oniontown could ever rectify its horrible
reputation. “How do you get it all back? How do you get out from under
it? How do you heal Oniontown?” He sighed. “I don’t think you can. It’s
going to be that way forever. After all the people are dead and they
bulldoze the place, the whole mystery will still be there.”
Later that afternoon, I ventured back up to Oniontown and, as I
approached, saw smoke coming from the stovepipe of Patty and Dick’s
trailer. I knocked and was greeted by a hard-looking middle-aged woman
wearing a flannel shirt and big spectacles. Patty welcomed me inside. A
little Christmas tree was set up in the corner, and a massive woodstove
kept the place tropically warm. A TV in the living room played
Big Daddy
via satellite. It was utterly normal. She introduced me to Desaray, her
19-year-old granddaughter, who had dropped out of school and was
crashing with them for the time being. We sat on the couch, and Patty
shared photos of her extended family—a lot of her relatives were in jail
or had passed away. There were pictures of Desaray’s mother, Bambi, who
was serving time for burglary. “We’re hoping she’ll get out before the
New Year,” she said. Desaray’s 17-year-old brother, Joey, was also
behind bars for an unrelated burglary. After perusing her photos, Patty
brought over the stack of the day’s mail and retrieved a thick envelope,
a prison letter from Joey. Inside were two long, handwritten missives,
and the granddaughter and grandmother sat down to read them.
“Awww. That little shit. It seems like he’s doing good. Listen to this,” Desaray said.
How is OT? Any drama? It’s OT! Of course there’s drama! Laugh out loud. Patty continued reading her own letter, looking morose. “He wants to know what we had for Thanksgiving dinner.”
Desaray Duncan in her bedroom.
At dusk, a truck pulled up in the dirt outside. It was Dick Smith,
Patty’s husband, fresh off his 12-hour shift spreading manure. In his
late 50s, Dick was a proud, tough man, born and raised in Oniontown. I
found him outside by a container unit, talking to a guy named Kenny, who
was innocuously holding two vacuum-sealed bags of weed. Kenny chatted
about a drug raid that had gone down in town the night before.
“They had dope, crack, meth, everything,” Kenny said. “I kept telling
them, when the cops are driving back and forth in front of your house
every day, it’s going to go down soon. A lot of bad shit—they’re going
away for a long time.”
“Look at you, man.” Dick pointed to the bags.
“Oh, it’s just weed. It’s nothing serious.”
With that, Dick retired to the trailer to shave and get cleaned up.
Once he was relaxed in his favorite armchair, we spoke about his
hometown: “Everyone thinks you’re lower class, no good, second-rate. You
get picked on and beat up. They say you’re inbred, and next thing you
know you’re fighting with three or four guys. You learn to fight and
take care of yourself. I’ve been fighting all my life. My hands and
knuckles is scarred and broke from fighting.” I asked him how it had
been when he was in school. “The kids pick on you. You grow up watching
your back. They come up behind you and punch you in the head. A lot of
people hide the fact that they’re from here. The stigma has always been
there. My dad remembered it. My grandkids deal with it.”
I felt comfortable enough to bring up the YouTube videos, and Dick was
unrepentant about the way these unwelcome visitors had been driven out:
“Older people used to run you out with a shotgun here if you weren’t
invited. Now if you come in and act right, you’re all right. But if you
come here looking for trouble, you’ll get trouble.”
We stopped talking. Dick’s attention diverted to the reality show
Storage Wars
while Patty and Desaray made venison gravy in the kitchen. After the
show concluded, Dick changed the channel, stopping on the climax of
Total Recall—the
scene where Quaid blows up the control room and everyone’s eyes are
bugging out of their sockets from decompression and exposure to the
Martian atmosphere.
“What’s this?” Patty asked.
“
Total Recall,” Dick said, looking entranced. “They make him believe that the outside world would kill him.”
After everything crumbles, Schwarzenegger and the female lead step out
into the sunlight. As the triumphant music is cued, they move together
for the final passionate kiss. Dick abruptly changed the channel.
“It’s only on TV,” he scoffed.
“What is?” Patty asked.
“The happy ending.”
Dick Smith plays with his granddaughter Hannah.
Later that night, Patty gave me a ride in her Jeep back to my motel.
Zooming down the dark mountain road with the car heater blasting, she
told me that her father hadn’t wanted her to marry Dick because he was
from Oniontown. “A lot of people are prejudiced, and I just don’t
understand how they can be,” she said. “You have to get to know the
person. You can’t judge them based on where they’re from. It’s gotten
worse in the last couple of years.”
When we reached the motel, she wished me goodnight and I got out.
Famished, I walked down the main road until I found a place called Four
Brothers Pizza Restaurant, apparently the only place in town that was
still open. Inside, the restaurant was completely empty. Teenage
waitresses paced behind the counter, spraying Windex on countertops and
organizing stacks of napkins, trying to look busy for their manager. I
sat down at the counter and ordered a beer. I asked two waitresses what
they knew about Oniontown.
“I heard it’s really dangerous,” one said.
“Two kids from my school are from there—both of them got expelled,” said the other.
“My boyfriend’s friends went up there and people shot at them.”
“It’s a meth area. A whole lot of meth.”
The bearded manager overheard the conversation and shuffled over to put in his two cents.
“I know why it’s called Oniontown. It’s because that field on the other
side of the tracks used to be filled with wild onions. Then there’s the
whole incest thing. You see red-headed mulattos walking around in the
little towns around here, and you know where they came from.”
“But how can it be incest if the people are mixed race?” I asked.
“The incest wasn’t at that initial stage,” he explained
authoritatively. “It happened later on down the line, with the first
cousins.”
Patty prepares Easter baskets.
The next morning I walked across Dover Plains past the wooden churches
and Dunkin’ Donuts to a place called Murphy’s Auto Parts, where
Oniontown Road begins its ascent. Dick had told me to speak with Warren
Wilcox and Fred Murphy, the last surviving descendants of the original
Oniontown families. I found them in the dusty office at the back of the
auto-parts store. Warren was reluctant to talk. “Oniontown is dead,” he
said. “All of the original people died off. We keep to ourselves and
don’t want to be bothered.”
While some people mentioned that inbreeding was the problem with
Oniontown, others nervously discussed the residents’ supposed
“intermingling,” or race mixing. Oniontown was all white until the late
60s and 70s, when several of Ethel Smith’s young daughters married black
men and brought them back up to the mountain. “It’s those niggers up
there that are causing the problems,” Warren said. “No one used to come
in and bother us.”
The YouTube incidents inevitably came up. Fred sat, folding his arms as
he said, “If people came up into your yard and did donuts and called
you a fucking nigger and a half-breed, what would you do?”
After I left the auto parts store, I walked up the road to Oniontown,
stopping periodically to pick up some rocks, in case I encountered pit
bulls. The paved road dead-ended, and I spotted Desaray and her friends
out in the middle of a big empty field. Desaray said she had gotten
locked out of Patty and Dick’s trailer the night before. Rap-rock blared
out of her young, pregnant friend’s SUV and the group stood around
outside the car smoking, comparing tongue rings, and calling one another
gay, passing time in the way that only young people can. They listened
to Lil’ Wayne and booty-danced to a song that sounded like some kind of
warped remix of “Cotton Eye Joe,” which I would soon learn was about
titty-fucking. Then that popular Kid Cudi song came on and they sang
along:
Tell me what you know about dreams, dreams/ Tell me what you know about night terrors, nothing.
I caught a ride with Desaray and her friends back up to Patty’s
trailer. Desaray took me to her room and showed me her Joose and Four
Loko collection. Like her grandpa, she said she had fought her way
through school. “Kids would just sit there and push you and sometimes
just punch you in the back of the head. I got jumped in eighth grade
because I’m from here—a couple of girls came up and said my whole family
was nothing but a bunch of inbred niggers and I just lost it.”
I asked Desaray how people found out where they were from. “We normally
keep it to ourselves that we’re from here. But it somehow came out in
school that I was from Oniontown. After that certain people didn’t talk
to me.”
Desaray told me she was having a difficult time finding a job. Having
an Oniontown address didn’t make it any easier. “The post office doesn’t
deliver, so we all have PO boxes in town. But a lot of places around
here want your mailing address and your home address. If they want both,
it sucks. Because of our reputation we have to suffer everyone else’s
stupidity.”
A basket of plastic flowers and an American flag hang over Ethel Smith’s window.
In 2008, Desaray moved upstate for a while with her dad. The Dover
school system had always put her in remedial classes and held her back.
But at the school upstate she said she had absolutely no problems. When
she returned to Oniontown, it was in the midst of the influx of
YouTubers. “I wasn’t back for five minutes when one of them pulled up.
We would just be trying to do our own thing, and you’d hear someone
shout ‘YouTuuuube.’ You’d hear it and you wouldn’t want to hear it. We
would get three cars in here a weekend, like we were some kind of freak
show.” She explained how they would defend against the scourge. “We
would lock the cattle gate and shut them in here. They would of course
roll up their windows and lock the doors, but as soon as they came in
here the windows were gone anyway. My cousins would ask them, ‘What are
you here for? You want to film us?’ And some would say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m
sorry, I’m sorry.’ And others were like, ‘No, no, no… wrong turn.’ Then
my cousins would decide if they were lying or not. It’s been a lot
better lately.”
The countermeasures worked—Oniontown’s reputation is now more
intimidating than ever before, and people once again fear for their
lives to go there. Desaray’s cousin Jamal was a driving force in pushing
out the gawkers. During my visit to Oniontown, Jamal had radiated
nothing but ire and disdain toward me, perhaps with good reason, seeing
as how I was camped outside his house like a paparazzo trying to get an
interview with his grandmother Ethel. Desaray had a talk with Jamal and
told him I was “cool,” and soon enough I was hanging out with the skinny
19-year-old kid in a flannel shirt and a fur winter hat. Jamal had
grown up in Brooklyn, in the Cypress Hills Houses. His mother was from
Oniontown, and they had left the city to be closer to family after his
father left them. He knew what people said about Oniontown, but he
didn’t think much of it. “These white boys up here call you inbred, call
you niggers up here and shit. Makes you want to go to jail.”
When Jamal was 13, he crushed a Dover kid’s skull during a fight and
went to jail for 18 months. He said that he felt like the legend of his
brutality might have played a part in attracting people coming up to the
settlement. When he returned home from jail, the YouTube phenomenon was
in full swing. “Every single day they were coming up here. We had to
shut them down. I don’t want to be video-camera’ed like some kind of
fucking animal.”
Jamal said he planned to stay in Oniontown as long as Ethel was still
breathing. “She’s our heart up here. She keeps us stable. Alive in a
way, I guess you could say. We call her the Warden.” As Jamal and I
smoked cigarettes, we looked out at the bleak vista—gray skies, a
burned-down house, trailers. He sighed, “There aren’t any fucking
monsters up here. Normal people, normal lives.”
By 5 PM it was dark outside. I made one last abortive attempt to
interview Ethel, waiting in the now-familiar eaves as voices murmured on
the other side of the door, discussing. “She doesn’t want to talk,”
reported a droopy-faced woman. Having been thrice denied by the Warden, I
took my cue to leave. Dick and Patty were off at court—apparently some
manure had fallen out of the back of Dick’s truck and hit a cop car,
which resulted in charges of driving with an unsecured load. Without a
ride down the mountain, I said goodbye to Desaray and began the long,
dark walk down the empty road, beneath the black silhouettes of
mountains and clouds backlit by the moon.
As I walked I thought about how if you’re not part of their world,
playing society’s games and making up stories to tell about yourself,
those stories will eventually be made up for you by others. And I
thought about how there may be places set back from the world, away from
glowing floodlights and prying eyes staring out of car windows, but
there is nowhere to go to escape the murmur of their endless talk. And I
thought about how the world is a spinning top, plowing forward through
the chaos of time, all of its weight precariously balanced on a single,
ever-spinning tip called reputation.
