Schönrath

According to oral tradition, a knight named Sigwin is said to have given away his seat, Schoenroide, in the 14th century to atone for a blood debt. Scholars Mosler and Huck, however, trace the farm's ownership by the Cistercian Abbey of Altenberg back to 1210, a status it retained until the abbey's dissolution in 1803. At 773 Morgen it was by then the largest of the abbey's farms, having grown through the acquisition of neighboring land in Buchheim, Mülheim, Espen, and possibly Merheim. Lay brothers initially worked the land, but from the 15th century onward it was leased to tenant farmers (Halfen). During the French Revolution, the buildings briefly sheltered clergy fleeing the left bank of the Rhine. The last tenant before secularization was Heinrich Rolshoven, succeeded by his son Johann, who married Anna Sibilla Düppes of Gut Iddelsfeld in 1815 before moving to the nearby Gut Neufeld he had built in Holweide; the Becker family then took over. In 1827 ownership passed to the Barons (later Counts) Fürstenberg zu Stammheim, based at Stammheim Castle, who continued to have the farm run by tenants.

Under the Fürstenbergs, the estate was split, and a separate farm called Neurath was established nearby, roughly at today's Neurather Weg 18 in Cologne-Mülheim; it has since been demolished. Even before secularization, some maps hint at this two-part structure: Johann Heinrich Schlieper's 1772 map shows two distinct building markers in the area, as does a topographical map from around 1800. The Wiebeking (1789/92) and Wiebeking-Bechstatt (1799) maps are incomplete or differently labeled here, naming only "Schündenb.," which has been linked to the neighboring Rotter Hof. Some interpret this as evidence that Schönrath once consisted of a main farm and a subsidiary holding.