Smith-Midland Corporation

Smith-Midland Corporation started in 1960 as a cattleguard maker on a Fauquier County farm and now runs precast concrete plants from its headquarters in Midland, Virginia. The company molds architectural cladding, sound walls, retaining walls, utility vaults, highway barrier and modular precast buildings, and it licenses several of those designs to other producers. Work spans commercial buildings, transportation and infrastructure, utilities and agriculture, mostly along the Eastern Seaboard. Its SlenderWall panel system clad Nine on the Hudson, the residential tower at Port Imperial, New Jersey. Three plants, at Midland, Reidsville in North Carolina and Hopkins in South Carolina, carry PCI and NPCA certification. Smith-Midland trades on NASDAQ as SMID and booked $93.5 million in 2025 revenue.

Leadership is now in the third generation of the Smith family. David G. Smith started the business, son Rodney Smith followed, and Ashley Smith was named CEO in 2018.

The three plants are different sizes for different work. Midland, Virginia covers 50 acres with 59,000 square feet under roof; Smith-Carolina at Reidsville, North Carolina runs 46 acres and 15,000 square feet; Smith-Columbia at Hopkins, South Carolina has 39 acres and 29,000 square feet. The Virginia plant was in the first round of fourteen North American plants certified by the National Precast Concrete Association, back in 1989.

Two products define the company’s patent position. J-J Hooks, the positive-connection highway barrier system, was developed in 1990 and had reached 16 million linear feet worldwide by 2021. SlenderWall, the precast-and-steel-stud cladding panel, came in 1992; the first installation was the Health Insurance Plan building in North Brunswick, New Jersey, and in 2007 it clad The Westin in Virginia Beach, which the company describes as the tallest building in Virginia.

Two subsidiaries extend the model past manufacturing. Easi-Set Worldwide licenses five proprietary product lines to precast producers globally, and Concrete Safety Systems, formed in 1977, rents safety barrier across the Mid-Atlantic and manages barrier logistics.

The project list runs from towers to public landmarks: Nine on the Hudson at Port Imperial, The Latitude Apartments in Arlington, The Lumen in Tysons, a retaining wall at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, and the Nelson/Harvey Building at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

Production follows lean manufacturing modelled on the Toyota Production System, with a full-time safety officer across all three plants and regular OSHA training. Recent recognition includes the 2023 AGC Washington Contractor Award for Transform I-66 Outside the Beltway and NPCA Best Practices awards in 2020 and 2021.