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Sure, people who live or work on the Northwest Side know plenty about about the area.

After all, you drive by the same places every day — maybe so often that you could drive those streets blindfolded.

But do Oro Valleyans know that a countess once called your area home?

And how many parents of students at Marana's Twin Peaks Elementary School, 7995 W. Twin Peaks Road, look at the area's single peak and wonder where its twin is.

Well, wonder no more.

Here are five things many people don't know about the Northwest Side.

Lady Margaret Howard, the countess of Suffolk and Berkshire, built her winter residence in what would later become Oro Valley in the 1930s. She called the 293-acre estate Forest Lodge because it was surrounded by a citrus grove.

The future countess was the daughter of Chicago business mogul Levi Leiter. She married into English nobility when she wed Henry Molyneaux Paget Howard, the earl of Suffolk and Berkshire.

They lived in a manor house in England, had three children and traveled often until the earl was killed in combat during World War I in 1917.

Margaret Howard bought the land for her Forest Lodge estate in 1934. In 1935 she hired a local architect to build her home in the international or modern style.

She sold her estate in the mid-1950s because she thought the area was getting too developed. The real estate pamphlet for the property listed it at $250,000, furnished. A development firm bought most of the property and named the neighborhood Suffolk Hills after the countess — a move that caused her to unsuccessfully sue the firm.

When she sold Forest Lodge, the countess bought a ranch a few miles southwest of Oracle and built another winter home there. She spent time between in Arizona and England until 1968, when she had a heart attack while she was flying from Arizona to California, according to 1968 and 1983 Arizona Daily Star articles The plane made an emergency landing and she was pronounced dead. She was 88 years old.

Today a portion of the countess's former Forest Lodge estate is the site of Immaculate Heart Academy, 410 E. Magee Road.

The Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary bought 20 acres of the property in 1957 through a real estate agent, said Sister Mary Evelyn Soto, the school's president of pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

Sometimes in the wintertime, the countess visited the school grounds to see how the buildings were, Soto said. Soto never met her, but some of the other sisters did, she said.

The school still uses some of the estate's original buildings. Some of the sisters live in the countess's former home, the former stables and garages are now classrooms, the caretaker's building is the current administration building and the former tack room is now a music room, Soto said.

Twin Peaks, of Twin Peaks Road and Twin Peaks Elementary School fame, has only one peak, but that wasn't always the case.

Unlike the mysterious nature of the television show of the same name, there's nothing mysterious about the disappearance of Twin Peaks' eastern peak. It is the result of mining.

Twin Peaks is about two miles south of Twin Peaks Road and a mile east of North Sandario Road, on land owned by Arizona Portland Cement Co. The company, which plans to change its name to CalPortland Cement Co., built its main plant in 1948. The next year, it began mining Twin Peaks' eastern peak for limestone, a main ingredient in cement, said plant manager Dave Bittel.

The plant is located on the west side of I-10 at 1115 N. Casa Grande Highway.

Bittel started working for Arizona Portland Cement Co. in 1972 and he estimates that, by that time, the eastern peak was about halfway gone. Today, it is nearly at ground level.

The company hasn't mined the remaining peak yet, but it would be good material for aggregate rock, Bittel said.

Pinal Air Park, formerly called Marana Air Base, has changed names and hands over the decades, and at one time was owned and operated by a company linked to the CIA.

Intermountain Aviation, which is said to have been a front for the CIA, bought the air park in 1966, a March 2007 Arizona Daily Star column said. A 1998 Star article said that Intermountain was "wholly owned" by the CIA.

Pinal County now owns Pinal Air Park, though it leases the land to Evergreen Maintenance Center, a December 2007 Star article said. Evergreen bought Intermountain in 1975, taking over the air park two years year, the Star column said.

Today, the Army National Guard trains there. And rumors still fly about what did or didn't go on at the air base during Intermountain's ownership.

Ted Gup, a journalism professor who is a former staff writer for the Washington Post and Time magazine, wrote about Marana Air Base in his 2000 book "The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA."

In it, Gup writes that Marana Air Base was for years the "premier CIA training ground for paramilitary operations, offering a kind of postgraduate curriculum in the air ops."

A business district at the heart and soul of Marana met its end in 1961 when I-10 was built.

Marana Mayor Ed Honea remembers going to the Mercantile, a historic business district, as a child.

"It was definitely the retail center for Marana, Avra Valley, Picture Rocks and all the areas out here," he said.

The Mercantile district, which was off the old Casa Grande Highway, served the area's residents and people passing through. Back then, motorists could just pull off the highway; there weren't restrictions like there are now, Honea said.

He recalls the district having a cafe, barbershop, ice cream shop, grocery store, liquor store, dime store, sheriff's substation, cotton gins and other necessities and amenities.

He remembers passing by it as a child during the 1950s and seeing huge blocks of ice at an ice house, where people got ice to pack around food they were transporting in their cars.

The district's number was up in 1961, though, when I-10 came through the area and the right of way had to be expanded for the new freeway system.

Losing the Mercantile was a major blow.

"It really changed what Marana was because we had a grocery store, barbershops — things you could go to to help facilitate your life," Honea said. "People were not as mobile back in the early days, either. … People were reliant on the Mercantile for their very existence."

Two national magazines this year included Oro Valley in their lists of the best places to live.

The first, Fortune Small Business, ranked the town No. 44 in its April list of 100 Best Places to Live and Launch. The magazine ranked places based on business-friendliness and lifestyle offerings. Two other Arizona towns also made the cut — Scottsdale, at No.. 25, and Prescott, at No. 92.

Oro Valley again found national recognition a few months later, when it made Family Circle's list of 10 Best Towns for Families. An article published in the magazine's August issue said that Oro Valley had kept its small-town feel, despite a 25 percent population increase since 2000.

Family Circle, with the help of a research firm, selected towns based on cost of living, schools, jobs and environmental friendliness, among other criteria.