Colonel John Irwin erected Brush Hill along the historic Forbes Road after Native Americans burned his log house and lightning struck and destroyed his subsequent frame house. This stone house differs from the square vernacular stone houses erected by many settlers, as it is a large (35 × 54 feet), rectangular, Georgian-influenced two-story house with a central passage plan. Brush Hill was the center of a 700-acre working plantation, which included a gristmill along nearby Brush Creek. The borough of Irwin encroached on the Brush Hill property in the twentieth century, and the house is now surrounded on all sides by twentieth-century tract houses.