Feature: Long-time Orcutt resident Kathy Brodie opened up her 43-acre property to the community 

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Kathy Brodie’s legacy lies in the Orcutt Hills. Throughout her life, she’s seen Orcutt shift from a small oil town in the ’60s to the expanding community it’s become.

“This is my history, I went up into those foothills to visit my relatives in little oil field houses. No one had electricity,” Brodie said. “We had gas that came right out of the ground, but nobody had electricity. My grandma never had a refrigerator until she moved to Old Town Orcutt.”

Her grandparents emigrated from Denmark to Orcutt. Born in 1951, Brodie was raised by her mother and father on 60 acres “in the middle of nowhere.” She grew up with her relatives nearby, spent a lot of her time roaming the foothills, and learned the value of nature from an early age, she said.

By the 1970s, Brodie inherited some money from her relatives, and she told her father she wanted to buy land instead of investing in a “fancy car or a fancy house.” So she bought a 43-acre property, isolated from the community, and her father purchased the mineral rights.

Around this time, Brodie and her husband divorced and she raised her two sons, farmed pigs, sold Tupperware, and worked for her parents. Through all of this, she maintained her property up in the hills and visited often.

“It was my little getaway. My kids would go to camp up there,” Brodie said. “I had this little corner of the world where I could escape and just be out in the country.”

She wanted to live up there but couldn’t find a reliable water source, so it remained her family’s escape, she said. As time went on, her acres became more desirable. Developments like Rice Ranch grew around her property, and people came knocking, asking her to sell.

Between 2015 and 2017, three men from the Santa Maria Recreation and Parks Department approached Brodie and asked if they could purchase her property to develop a park with tennis courts and soccer fields, but she had a different dream.

“I want to be able to share the simple times and the beauty of the Orcutt foothills,” Brodie said. “I want to preserve and open up my property to people. Maybe they weren’t born here, but they can go up there and get the feel of what it was like to be born in the Orcutt foothills.”

She turned to Santa Maria Valley Open Space, an Orcutt-based nonprofit organization that works to establish public trails in a natural setting to serve the valley and its surrounding residents. The Open Space team helped create small trails along her property, and now people can head up there to hike at their leisure.

“The open spaces where we can get out and just be are disappearing,” she said. “You need to get outside and experience the sky and the wind and the dirt and the trees.”

Along with its several trails—all looped into the Orcutt Trail System—there’s a eucalyptus grove people can walk through and collect herbs like black sage, mugwort, and elderberry to take home. Eventually, Brodie said, she’d like to work with Cal Poly’s Plant Sciences program to develop a botanical garden in the grove. She added that she’d like to dedicate the grove to her father, and leave a cross on one of the hills within the area for her mother.

Now retired, Brodie does what she can to maintain her property but gets a lot of help from her son, who’s equally passionate about preserving the land and will eventually inherit the property and keep his mother’s mission afloat.

“It’s a preservation project for me; it’s preserving a part of our history in these foothills that are disappearing,” Brodie said. “My little corner is not going to disappear because as long as I’m alive and my son’s alive we’re going to keep it preserved.”