Marquardsburg Castle

In the district of Marquardsburg, on the edge of a hill directly above the Eckenbach and above the Eckenmühle, lies a manor house. The two-story ashlar building with a five-axis facade and hip roof is first mentioned in 1716. The manor house was built by Georg Tobias Muffel near the Fraischgrenze (border of jurisdiction) of the Schnaittach district court on the territory of the Lauf administrative district as a modest "summer house or pleasure castle" and named after his one-year-old son Marquard. The Protestant lord of the manor thus circumvented the ban on permanent settlement of Protestant citizens in the now Bavarian Rothenberg Fraisch district, to which Eckenhaid belonged, which was agreed upon between the Imperial City of Nuremberg and Electoral Bavaria in 1661 and came into force in 1700.

Even before the death of the last Muffel at Eckenhaid, Georg Marquard (he died in 1784), disputes arose between the Imperial City of Nuremberg and the Electoral Bavarian government regarding the succession of the soon-to-be-reverted imperial fiefs of Eckenhaid and Marquardsburg. Electoral Bavaria was able to assert itself with its candidate, the high government official Karl Theodor Graf von Bettschart, who took over possession of the estates from 1790, even though the enfeoffment remained disputed until the end of the Old Empire.

After the count's death in 1820, the fiefs reverted to the Kingdom of Bavaria, which took the estates into its own administration. The inventories drawn up in this context describe the castle as a three-story, solid building (including the cellar) with an attached tower. The entire building – as well as a barn, a cattle shed, and a wood shed – was "in a high state of disrepair." A day laborer's house was even in such poor condition that "its collapse is to be feared daily." After the building maintenance consumed the surpluses, Marquardsburg was put up for auction in the summer of 1830 by the responsible Hersbruck Rentamt and sold at the 2nd appointment on October 31, 1830, to Abraham Hirsch Gerngroß from Fürth (or Forth?). The complex, valued at 2,607 guilders, consisted at that time of the castle with courtyard, an annex, the barn, two wall towers, a draw well, and the surrounding walls with an archway.

Subsequently, the estate was sold to two farmers and profoundly redesigned, whereby the presumably polygonal stair tower, which formerly stood in the middle of the courtyard side, was removed.