As it should be, the grand marshals and leaders of this morning’s Napa Fourth of July Parade are our returning military men of the privately funded Pathway Home Program at the Yountville Veterans Home.  

By organizing the return of today’s holiday parade, the Sunrise Rotary Club of Napa has given the community an opportunity to answer the question: What can I do to support our troops? This is our chance to greet with cheers of gratitude these brave individuals who have made such great sacrifice for our country. 

The parade kicks off a weekend of activities, with fireworks filling the Napa Valley sky from Calistoga to American Canyon. It is moments like these that bring focus to what unique good fortune it is to have been born or have become a citizen of this nation.

Among the many privileges we enjoy in our country is the opportunity for each citizen to own private property. Even in these times of economic hardship, first-time home owners represent the largest segment of the buyer market. Such privilege did not evolve overnight.

From the first European arrivals, the right to claim land for personal use and enjoyment was a fundamental principle of our democratic system. The ability to exercise this right was critical to an agricultural society blessed with low populations and an abundance of farmable land and open space.

There were few, if any, property taxes in those days, and no restrictions on the use and enjoyment of your land. There was no planning department to deal with and no building permit required. As the populations migrated west, fences began to identify boundaries, first to contain cattle and later to separate your property from mine. As a vast frontier, the west was last to enjoy the apparent unlimited supply of the natural resources of land and water.

As small villages were created and populations increased, the sizable land grants were partitioned into parcels of private acreage with each parcel owned by a single family and passed down from generation to generation.

Here in Napa, as in other parts of California, we do not need to go back very far to find Spanish land grants or to locate familiar family names such as Yount, Coombs, Dunlap and Noyes, all of whom enjoyed a valley floor filled with giant oaks and occasional fruit orchards.

As we celebrate our independence this weekend, we can look back at the many local changes that have occurred to the original freedoms of private property use and ownership. Yet, with all those changes our Napa County has retained its reputation and reality of a community with a strong agricultural base and an enviable quality of life.

As we enjoy the more than 50 entries in today’s parade, may we remember that there would be no freedoms without the commitment of the armed forces of our nation. This one freedom — the individual right to own real property — has always been, and we hope always will be, a part of the American Dream.