By Mary C. Marvin

Jun. 10, 2015:  After the beautiful weekend we just enjoyed, I was prompted to reflect upon how fortunate we are to live in Westchester County.

We constantly hear the mantra that we live in the highest-taxed county in the country with very expensive day-to-day necessities as well as home prices. All true! (As an illustrative anecdote, in my hometown in upstate New York, "quick cash" at the ATM is a twenty dollar bill, not $100). On the flip side, we also live in a unique county full of history, interesting people, and unexpected surprises.

The following are some "Did-You-Knows" I unearthed while enjoying Sunday in the sunshine:

• Already the richest and most populous county in the colony of New York by 1775, Westchester is now the second-wealthiest county in New York State and the seventh-wealthiest in the nation.

• Covering 450 square miles and 45 municipalities, it is larger than 40 countries.

• First visited by Italian explorer Verrazano in 1524 and later by Henry Hudson in 1609, English settlers arrived in the 1640s and named their new home for the English city of Chester.

• As of the last census, Westchester had a population just slightly under one million residents, one in five of whom were born outside the United States. The county is served by 48 public school districts, 118 private and parochial grammar and secondary schools, and 14 colleges.

• Forbes rated it the ninth-best place to grow old, citing the gorgeous natural beauty within such close proximity to Manhattan as major positives.

• Notable Westchesterites include: 
  

  • Founding Father, New York governor, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and first chief justice of the Supreme Court John Jay moved his family to Rye, studied with Anglican pastor Pierre Stoupe in New Rochelle, and retired to a homestead in Bedford.

  • Painter Norman Rockwell lived in New Rochelle from 1913 to 1939, which he called "some of his happiest years." He painted most of his iconic Saturday Evening Post covers while living in New Rochelle.

  • Mount Vernon native Lt. Ira Palm led a raid on Adolph Hitler's Munich apartment in the spring of 1945 and came back to the States with a gold-plated pistol bearing the initials "A H."

  • John Peter Zenger wrote an article about an Eastchester town election that heavily criticized the New York governor. Litigation over the article led to the immortalization of freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights, hence the name Bill of Rights Plaza at the intersection of Mill Road and Route 22 in Eastchester.

  • In 1979, "Mean Joe" Greene filmed the iconic Coca-Cola commercial with the young boy in the tunnel at Mount Vernon's Memorial Field at the corner of Sanford Boulevard.

  • In Tarrytown in 1780, British Army Major John André was captured by American militiamen as he attempted to smuggle plans for the fort at West Point, which were provided to him by Benedict Arnold.

  • Yonkers resident Leo Baekland invented one of the world's first and most useful plastics in 1907 and formed in 1910 what eventually became The Bakelite Corporation. It manufactured the glossy, brightly colored plastics that defined the '50s and '60s.

  • In 1888, Yonkers resident John Reid became the first person to play golf on American soil, naming his three-hole course in a local apple orchard St. Andrews.

• Some Westchester Firsts:
  

  • Union Church in Pocantico Hills has nine Chagall stained-glass windows and one Henri Matisse. The Matisse "rose window" was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to honor his mother. Matisse finished the design just two days before he died. The Chagall windows, the only series in America, were commissioned by David Rockefeller.

  • The first chapter of the Garden Club of America was founded in Bedford in 1938.

  • Paddle tennis was invented in Scarsdale in 1928 and first played at the Fox Meadow Club there in 1931.

  • The Bronx River, or Aquehung, as Native Americans called it, served as the key border between the Wappinger and Siwanoy Native American tribes. The Bronx River Parkway, completed in 1925, was the first multi-lane limited-access parkway in North America.

Finally, an early prospectus for Bronxville boasted:  "Few New Yorkers know that within three miles of the City limits is a varied and undulating country. . . . There are no fences; everyone appears to own everything. You will find the lawn of one resident winding curiously into that of another, whose grounds, in turn, merge into still another occupant's. There are no flat lawns or level gardens, but the slopes are dotted with trees, ribbed with fine rock, and starred with wild flowers."