Merck, Rockingham County

Merck’s expansion at its Rockingham County site, announced in late 2025, represents the continuation of a long, mutually beneficial tenure in the Commonwealth.

In October 2025, Merck announced a new $3 billion facility at its existing site in the town of Elkton, to serve as the company’s Center of Excellence for Pharmaceutical Ingredients and Small Molecule Manufacturing. Merck has been producing essential medicines at the site for 85 years.

The Elkton plant officially came into existence Feb. 7, 1941, when Merck announced a new facility to manufacture vitamins and antibiotics for American soldiers in World War II. Then known as the Stonewall Plant, it initially employed about 300, roughly a third of Elkton’s population at the time and a far cry from the more than 1,000 Virginians employed at the site today, which is set to increase by 500 with the latest expansion. 

Merck, Rockingham County

The plant’s first shipment of vitamin B left the factory in January 1942, and the site earned the nickname “Vitamin Valley” for its dominant industry, but went through multiple reinventions over the years. In 1985, Merck began producing the broad-spectrum antibiotic Primaxin at the plant and has since produced more than 1.5 billion vials of the medicine, which are shipped to 96 countries.

“The site is resilient and able to transform and rebuild itself,” said Todd Stamp, an associate vice president at Merck and manager of the Elkton plant. “We’ve been at the site for 85 years and are looking forward to another 85 years.”

In 2022, Merck completed a $1 billion expansion of its plant to bolster vaccine production. The most recent expansion will support the company’s small molecule manufacturing and testing, ensuring the highest-quality product to help the company fulfill its mission, articulated by company president George W. Merck during a speech at the Medical College of Virginia (now part of Virginia Commonwealth University) in 1950: 

“We try to remember that medicine is for the patient. We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they never fail to appear.”