Peeling Oniontown. 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. In Dover Plains, the very word Oniontown causes people to frown, as if confronted with a foul smell or some unpleasant, long-repressed memory. No one, not even the residents of the settlement, can definitively say where Oniontown’s peculiar name originated.
In the 1800s, poor white tenant farmers settled in the area. 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. AJE. Adbusters. The Indypendent.