Tucher Castle

In 1234, a family of imperial ministeriales, Albert von Rückersdorf, first appears, who were probably instrumental in the administration and protection of the imperial forest. Until the early 14th century, the family alternately called themselves after Rückersdorf and their seat in Beerbach. In the course of the late Middle Ages, the hereditary forest tenure passed to Nuremberg citizens. In 1423, it was sold by the Peringsdorfer family to Hans and Elsbet Gotfrid, without any fortified seat on the imperial fief being mentioned in the sources. Even in the report on strategically important points in the landscape, prepared at the instigation of the Nuremberg Council before the outbreak of the Landshut War of Succession in 1504, there is no mention of a fortification or a manor house.

A seat in Rückersdorf is only attested in 1542, when the Nuremberg patricians Erasmus Schürstab and Silvester Tucher were jointly in possession of the imperial fief. The wealthy Nuremberg mining entrepreneur Hans Buchner had sold the forest tenure in 1540 to the widow Katharina Ketzel, Silvester Tucher's mother-in-law. According to a document from 1595, the manor house itself was not built on the forest tenure, but allegedly on an immediately adjacent small estate, which had only been acquired in the 1530s.

The provisional end of the seat came already in the Second Margrave War, when margravial troops not only set fire to "der vorsthueb hawß" on May 25, 1552, but also tore it down. In 1555, Silvester Tucher bought Schürstab's share of the destroyed seat and began reconstruction. According to the preserved building records, the core building, which has been preserved to this day, a tower house still medieval in appearance with half-timbered upper floors on a massive ground floor, could already be inhabited in 1557. The attempt by the widow of the former co-owner Erasmus Schürstab to have a second manor house built on an adjacent property in 1555 failed due to the resistance of the forest office and the Tucher family.

The manor house was structurally extended several times in the 16th century: noteworthy is the construction of an annex, the so-called New Building, which the widow Ursula of Sylvester Tucher, who died in 1564, had carried out around 1572. When Ursula Schlegel, widowed Tucher, died in 1593, she bequeathed the forest tenure with the manor house to a relative, Christoph Grösser. The new owner carried out a renovation in 1594. Under Grösser's widow, the new construction of the Voithaus followed in 1607, for which the original plans have been preserved to this day, and the structural unification of the manor house with the New Building from 1572.

During the Thirty Years' War, all the furnishings, including the wall paneling, were removed and stored in Nuremberg. The Grösser family also did not return to Rückersdorf. Andreas Paulus Grösser, at times administrator of the imperial city office of Reicheneck, had incurred considerable debt to the widow Magdalena Tucher during the war, who finally, when repayment failed, obtained a forced execution in 1650. Immediately before the auction, Grösser and his wife Margaretha died under unspecified circumstances. Through a judicial settlement with the guardians of the seven minor children, the castle estate was then awarded to the creditor's son, Johann Sebastian Tucher. The manor house that fell to him brought Johann Sebastian Tucher little luck: In April 1663, his 29-year-old wife was murdered by unknown persons on the open road near Behringersdorf on a journey to or from Rückersdorf.

After Tucher's death in 1684, his son Johann Gottlieb inherited the estate. He served for many years as a high-ranking officer in the troops of the Franconian Circle and as an imperial city administrator of Reicheneck and Engelthal, and assigned the manor house to his stepmother Helena Barbara, née Ebner, as a widow's residence [cf. Happurg II]. In 1741, the then 79-year-old castle owner had the hitherto probably uninhabitable, hall-like ground floor of the manor house converted for his sickly son Carl Benedict. In 1745, the latter built the orangery, which is now used as a residential building, in the northern castle garden.

With Carl Benedict, this line of the Tucher family died out in 1750. His fortune fell to his son-in-law Johann Georg Haller von Hallerstein [cf. Großgründlach II, Hallerweiherhaus, Henfenfeld], then administrator of the imperial city office of Hersbruck. After his daughter Maria Hedwig Jakobina had already bequeathed the Voithaus and a large part of the castle garden to her Rückersdorf Vogt and gardener Häffner in 1816, the remaining complex was sold in parts to the highest bidders by the community of heirs in 1822. Finally, the manor house was in the hands of three owners. The part that had gone to the district forester Hofmann was temporarily used as a schoolhouse from 1846. More recent alterations developed rather unfortunately, such as the installation of rental apartments in the years after 1940, which led to the loss of many historical furnishings, and the alteration of the hitherto undisturbed western window axes in 1961. A fire in 1958, however, was mild. The manor house is now owned by the municipality of Rückersdorf.