"B" is for Brattonsville. Brattonsville is the site of a large eighteenth and nineteenth-century plantation in southern York County situated on the south fork of Fishing Creek. The settlement began in 1766 as the two hundred acre farm of Colonel William Bratton. John Simpson Bratton inherited the bulk of his father’s estate and constructed the large two-story Georgian mansion known as the Homestead.
Bratton converted his parents’ old log house into the Brattonsville Female Academy. His widow built a second large dwelling, Brick House. In the 1850s, John Bratton II erected an elaborate Italianate villa known as Forest Hall. Following the Civil War, the family moved into York and the land and buildings turned over to tenant farmers. In the 1970s Brattonsville was acquired by the York County Historical Commission and converted into an historic site now known as Historic Brattonsville.
