Plymouth Oil Company and Plymouth Oilers

Behind the ballclub stood a company with reach far beyond Sinton. Plymouth Oil was organized in Pittsburgh on October 19, 1923, as a holding company for the Big Lake Oil Company in Reagan County. Its San Patricio field of the 1930s came with an employee camp near Sinton called Los Encinos, and in 1948 the company added a pressure-maintenance, recycling and gas-lift plant in town. It drilled in twenty-seven Texas counties and later in nine other states and Canada. After the Suez crisis ended in 1957, the oil slump left Plymouth operating at a deficit by 1960.

What the plaque says

Plymouth Oil Company and Plymouth Oilers Pennsylvania-based Plymouth Oil Company was founded in 1923 by M.L. "Mike" Benedum (d. 1959). With operations headquarters in Sinton, the company profoundly affected the city's development by creating jobs, building company housing, and providing health and retirement benefits for many local workers. In 1933 Plymouth began leasing vast amounts of property in the area and in 1935 discovered oil on the Welder Ranch with completion of Welder Well C-1. In 1937 the company's second major discovery in San Patricio county was the Brigham Well No. 1 in the East White Point Field South of Taft. In 1949 company executive W.M. "Mike" Griffith (d. 1954) organized the semi-professional Plymouth Oilers baseball team, providing a tremendous boost to the Sinton area. The company hired proven players as permanent employees and employed college athletes during the summers. The team's games at company-built Oiler Park were major community events. The team won state, national, and world semi-pro championships in 1951. The baseball team played until 1957, and the company operated until 1962, when it was purchased by Ohio Oil Company, later known as Marathon Oil. (1991)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Aquarium — 17 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 17 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.
• Art Museum of South Texas — 17 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Mirador de la Flor — 18 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Sinton — 0.3 mi
• St. Paul — 4.9 mi
• Meansville and Kaleta — 7.6 mi
• Odem First Baptist Church — 7.9 mi