Jay Justin Clarke
Ennis, Ellis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
On June 15, 1902, at a baseball field in Ennis, Texas, Jay Justin Clarke set two single game professional Minor League Baseball records. The game was unusual because it was scheduled to be played in Corsicana, but was relocated to Ennis due to Corsicana’s “Blue Laws” which prohibited the playing of the game on a Sunday. The Corsicana Oil Citys beat the Texarkana Casketmakers 51-3 that day. Clarke, who played for the Oil Citys, hit eight home runs and tallied sixteen runs batted in, records that still stand as all-time Minor League records. The actual field has been lost to history, but played a major role in Clarke’s records as the fence was estimated to be less than 210 feet from home plate.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
On a Sunday in June 1902, a professional baseball game was shifted from Corsicana to a cramped Ennis field with a fence barely 200 feet from home plate. There Jay Justin Clarke slugged eight home runs and drove in sixteen runs in a single game — minor league records that still stand more than a century later, as his Corsicana team routed its opponent 51-3.
Why it matters
Clarke's astonishing afternoon endures as one of the most remarkable single-game feats in American baseball, a piece of the sport's freewheeling early history.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
At the turn of the twentieth century, professional baseball was booming across America, and Texas was no exception. Minor leagues sprang up wherever a town could field a team and fill a grandstand, and rivalries between neighboring towns drew rowdy, passionate crowds. The game of 1902 was a wilder, more improvised affair than the polished sport of today — ballfields varied enormously, records were kept unevenly, and an afternoon could produce numbers that still stagger the imagination.
Corsicana, in the blackland prairie of central Texas, was riding a particular kind of good fortune: oil. A boom had transformed the town, and its ball club took the fitting name of the Oil Citys. Prosperity and civic pride were bound up together, and a winning baseball team was one more way for a rising town to announce itself to its neighbors.
But prosperity ran up against piety. Many Texas towns of the era enforced blue laws — ordinances rooted in Sabbath observance that forbade all manner of activity on Sundays, baseball among them. A team that wanted to play on the one day working people were free to watch often had to find a town willing to look the other way. That collision of the booming secular pastime with old religious restriction set the stage for one of the most astonishing games ever played.
People & events
On the fifteenth of June, 1902, a game meant for Corsicana was moved instead to a ballfield in Ennis, because Corsicana's blue laws forbade Sunday play. The change of venue turned out to matter enormously, because the Ennis field was tiny — its outfield fence estimated at less than 210 feet from home plate, a distance that would be considered absurdly short by any standard, then or now.
Into that cramped little park stepped Jay Justin Clarke, playing for the Corsicana Oil Citys. What he did that afternoon has never been equaled. Clarke hit eight home runs in a single game and drove in sixteen runs — two single-game records that still stand in the entire history of Minor League Baseball, more than a century later. The Oil Citys buried their opponents, the Texarkana Casketmakers, by the almost unbelievable score of 51 to 3.
The short fence was surely part of the story; balls that might have been ordinary fly outs in a larger park sailed over the barrier all afternoon. But short fence or not, someone had to hit the ball, and again and again that someone was Clarke. He went on from that day to a career that carried him into the major leagues as a catcher — but nothing he did afterward, and nothing anyone else has done since, erased the extraordinary line he wrote into the record books on a Sunday in Ennis.
Its place in the American story
Clarke's eight home runs and sixteen runs batted in belong to the folklore of American baseball — the kind of feat that feels less like a statistic than a tall tale, except that it is true and written into the official record. In a sport that treasures its numbers above almost anything else, records that survive a full century are rare and precious. His have outlasted generations of players, ballparks, and leagues.
The game also captures something essential about baseball's freewheeling early era, before the sport was standardized and sanded smooth. Fields of wildly different sizes, scores that ran into the fifties, games shuffled from town to town to dodge local ordinances — this was baseball as a rough, exuberant, deeply local enterprise, woven into the civic life of boomtowns and rivalries. Clarke's afternoon is a perfect artifact of that world.
That a state historical commission chose to mark the event underscores how baseball became part of America's shared memory. The diamond, the box score, and the impossible afternoon all count as history worth preserving — evidence that the national pastime earned its name not only in big-league cities but on dusty small-town fields where a single game could produce a record for the ages.
If you visit
Ennis lies in the blackland country south of Dallas, along the interstate corridor that runs down toward Corsicana and Houston, which makes it an easy and rewarding stop on a road trip through central Texas. The town is well known for its springtime bluebonnet trails and its proud Czech heritage, and a baseball pilgrimage folds neatly into a day of exploring the area.
The marker is candid about one thing: the actual ballfield where Clarke made history has been lost to time. So do not come expecting to find the diamond or the famous short fence — come instead to stand in the town that hosted an afternoon no one has ever matched, and to let the sheer scale of the achievement sink in. Eight home runs, sixteen runs batted in, a 51-to-3 final: numbers that reward a moment of disbelief.
Use the visit to picture the scene as it must have been — a Sunday crowd that came to Ennis because Corsicana would not allow the game, a cramped little field, and one hitter who simply could not be stopped. Read the inscription, look out over the town, and enjoy the pleasure of standing where one of baseball's most improbable records was born, more than a century ago and still unbroken.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Themes & tags
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