The Preece family of Kermit, WV

I started reading this book called Death in Mud Lick, by Eric Eyre, who won the Pulitzer at the Charleston Gazette for his reporting on the thousands of pills being funneled into Kermit, WV, a town of ~400 people.

Eyre starts talking about the Preece family, and man, is it a crazy story!

In the ‘80s, the Preece family ran Kermit. Wig Preece, the patriarch, was the fire chief. He and his wife Cooney had 13 children. The kids were nicknamed things like Bull and Red Ed.

As the fire chief, Wig ran an arson-for-hire ring, which gave Kermit the highest rate of arson in the state. An LA Times article from 1988 said, “They moved fast as foxes if a fire was an accident, slow as old mules if it was on purpose.”

They also had a multi-million dollar drug business, selling weed, PCP, amphetamines, and tranquilizers out of a trailer next to the police station. They were so open about their business that they’d hang signs that said, “Out of Drugs. Back in 20 mins” and “No pot til noon.”

They got their weed from the nearby train line. A train worker was on the payroll. When he drove through town, he dumped bags of weed off the tracks for the Preece family and co. to scoop up. The family had so much marijuana stored in garbage bags that sometimes it accidentally got taken away by the garbage men, and then they had to go digging for the bags in the dump.

They didn’t get in trouble for any of this because everybody in Kermit had been bought and paid for by the Preece family. Their daughter Debbie, for example, was on the town council, and she was married to the chief of police.

The Preece family drove Mercedes and Cadillacs. They wore diamonds and lived in big houses. They stuffed ballots and controlled elections.

In 1986, they got busted by the FBI who were watching the family property from an empty train car.

8 members of the Preece family, not including in-laws, were sentenced. Over 60 people from Kermit were indicted.

Wig died in 2014. The local paper, the Mingo Messenger, memorialized him with an article that called him a “hero… who cared deeply for his friends and neighbors, someone who unfailingly placed everyone else’s safety and well-being above his own,” a man with a “heart of gold” and a “dedicated Christian.”

The town had a parade for his funeral. The video of this parade on YouTube inexplicably has Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You” as the background music. The town now has a fire school named after him, the Chief Wig Preece Memorial Fire School.