Orcutt was named after one of the major figures of the California oil industry, William Warren Orcutt, and was founded as a boom town, riding a high tide of oil production in the Santa Maria Valley in the early 1900s. For a time, Orcutt was the major trading and shipping center for northern Santa Barbara County.
W.W. Orcutt was a native of Minnesota and came to Santa Paula at age 12 with his family in the early 1880s. He was a member of Stanford University’s first graduating class in 1895 and earned an engineering degree. He was a classmate and good friend of Herbert Hoover. He returned to Santa Paula and opened an engineering office. In 1898, he went to work for the Union Oil Company, beginning a career with the firm that would last 42 years.
Orcutt was a pioneer in the use of geology in the exploration for oil, examining the structural terrain of an area to determine the likelihood of the presence of oil. Union Oil assigned him to survey the Santa Maria area. This region had been an area of oil exploration since the mid 1860s, but without result. Orcutt’s report in late 1901 urged the company to be aggressive in the area, and within a year, the company had leased more than 70,000 acres.