Schloss Scheuerfeld

A modest 16th-century manor house stands in the Nicolaus-Zech-Straße in Scheuerfeld, a western district of Coburg. The building began as a late-medieval farmstead in the 5th or 6th century and became a small castle under Nicolaus Zech, rentmaster to Duke Johann Casimir. A dry moat still traces the old boundary of the estate, now protected as a monument. The house matters because it carries the fingerprints of regional power-brokers. Zech bought the site in 1590 and built the present structure; his daughter Helena inherited it and married the jurist Johann Christian von Merklin. A tablet on the front records Zech’s gift of the estate to the parish in 1893, when it became the Evangelical vicarage. Beneath the building a 25-metre tunnel, uncovered only in the 1970s, is thought to have been an escape route. Visitors see a two-storey cube of stone and timber framed by a slate roof and a 17th-century gable. The thick ground floor belongs to the 1590s, while the upper storey and roof date from the early 18th century. Behind the house a stable block and a small park-like garden survive from Zech’s original estate. The round-arched cellar and the hidden passage are reminders of the building’s dual role as home and refuge.