This long-standing and curious controversy as to the eastern boundary involved, however, nothing more than rival claims of colonial jurisdiction, arising from mathematical inaccuracies in original calculations of distance, and from peculiar conditions of early settlement along the Sound, which presented a mere problem of territorial rectification upon the basis of reciprocal two commonconcessions bv the two provinces and subsequently the portion of the wealths concerned; and. accordingly, while leaving a. indeterminable somewhat County Westchester of line border eastern for two centuries, the issues at stake never affected the integrity of its aggregate area as allotted at the beginning. On the other hand, the southern boundary of the old county has undergone extremely which are still in progress. Since 1873, by modifications,' radical legislative acts, large sections of it have been cut away and various transferred to the City of New York, comprising what until recent vears were known as the " annexed districts " of the metropolis, now

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

officially styled the "Borough of the Bronx" of the Greater City. Although the county still retains its two most populous municipalities, Yonkers and .Mount Vernon, the New York City line has been pushed right up to their borders, and there is no reasonable doubt that within a few more years they, too, will be absorbed. Already fortyone and one half square miles, or 26,500 acres, have been annexed to the city. In these pages the story of old Westchester County is to be told; and whenever the county as a whole is mentioned without specific indication of the present limits, the reader will understand that the original county, including those portions which have actually passed under a new political jurisdiction, is meant. Westchester County, thus considered in its primal extent, is something more than five hundred square miles in area, and lies centrally distant some one hundred miles from Albany.