Spotsylvania Retires Its FMC Sewer Plant, Shifting Flow to Massaponax to Cut River Pollution

Spotsylvania County has formally retired the FMC Wastewater Treatment Plant, the sewage facility that grew out of a shuttered cellophane factory east of Fredericksburg. Everything the plant used to handle, roughly 2 million gallons a day, now travels by pipe to the county’s expanded Massaponax Wastewater Treatment Facility, where the county says it receives a more advanced level of treatment before it is released to the Rappahannock River.

Treatment at FMC actually stopped on Oct. 7, according to the county. Officials, utility staff and river advocates marked the closure on Tuesday, Nov. 10, by turning a ceremonial valve at the site, the Fredericksburg Free Press reported. The county announced the decommissioning the same day.

What changes for the river

The county’s case for the switch rests on nutrient pollution. Its utilities staff estimate that sending FMC’s flow through Massaponax’s enhanced nutrient removal process will cut nitrogen levels in the treated water roughly in half, from about 8 milligrams per liter to about 4. At current flows, the county projects that could keep as much as 37,000 pounds of nitrogen and about 600 pounds of phosphorus out of the river each year.

Those two nutrients feed algae blooms that strip oxygen from the water, a long-running problem for the Rappahannock and the Chesapeake Bay downstream. The figures are projections tied to today’s average flow, not measured results, and actual reductions will depend on how much wastewater the system carries in the years ahead. Representatives of the Rappahannock River Basin Commission and Friends of the Rappahannock both welcomed the change at Tuesday’s event, according to the Free Press.

What the project cost

The county puts the full construction program at $52 million. That covers a new pump station at the FMC site rated for 6.8 million gallons a day, an upgraded Deep Run pump station rated for 6 million gallons a day, a shared sewer force main that runs toward Massaponax, and the teardown of the old treatment works. A state Water Quality Improvement Fund grant of nearly $4.8 million, awarded in January, offsets part of the bill, though the county notes that the grant does not cover the Deep Run work.

County officials argue that consolidating at Massaponax was the cheaper path, because keeping the aging FMC plant would have required a costly overhaul to meet increasingly strict treatment standards. The new FMC pump station recently finished a 30-day performance test, county staff said during a site tour, the Free Press reported.

From factory town to sewer plant

The site carries nearly a century of local history. The Sylvania company opened its cellophane plant there in 1930, and the factory became one of the region’s steadiest employers through the Great Depression and World War II. It later passed to the American Viscose Corporation and then, in 1963, to FMC, the name it still carries. The Free Press, citing the Spotsylvania County Museum, reported that employment peaked at about 2,700 workers in 1957.

Falling demand for cellophane closed the factory in 1978. Two years later, the county bought the property, and it began treating municipal wastewater there in 1985. The Free Press reported that the City of Fredericksburg agreed at the time to help pay for converting the plant for shared use. The museum’s online exhibit, “Packaged Memories: Spotsylvania’s Cellophane Era,” tells the fuller story of the plant and the people who worked there.

Sources

• Spotsylvania County: Decommissioned FMC plant protects waterways, moves Spotsylvania forward (Nov. 10, 2026)

• Spotsylvania County: FMC Decommissioning, Building Upon a Legacy

• Spotsylvania County: Wastewater Treatment Consolidation & Conveyance (Route 2) project

• Fredericksburg Free Press: From cellophane to wastewater, FMC ‘was what the community needed at the right time’ (Nov. 11, 2026)