Yountville layers George Yount, wine history, and the Veterans Home

Yountville is famous now for food, wine, and a polished Napa Valley main street, but the older story starts with George C. Yount. In 1836, Yount received an 11,887-acre land grant from the Mexican government. His land stretched across the valley, from present-day Yountville toward the area south of St. Helena.

Yount named the land Caymus Rancho, after a local Native American tribe. He is remembered as the first permanent Euro-American settler in the area and the first person to plant grapes in Napa Valley. By the early 1850s, he had laid out a small village with a public square.

The town name took a few turns. A nearby community on Salvador Vallejo’s Rancho de Napa land was called Sebastopol. In 1867, after Yount died, residents voted to rename that community Yountville, and the two neighboring settlements became one. Rail service arrived in 1868, which helped the town grow. In 1874, Gottlieb Groezinger built a winery, barrel room, and distillery. Those stone buildings later became part of V Marketplace.

The Veterans Home gives Yountville another large and serious chapter. A veterans home association bought 910 acres near Yountville in 1882, and the home opened to its first residents on April 1, 1884. The property later became the Veterans’ Home of California under state control.

That mix is why Yountville has more layers than its dining reputation. It has a ranch and grape-growing beginning, a town-name story, railroad growth, stone winery buildings, and one of the state’s best-known veterans campuses. The main street feels neater when you know how many older layers sit behind it.