Steinbach am Taunus Audioguides

Steinbach appears in the historical record as early as 789 AD in the Lorsch Codex, making it one of the oldest documented settlements in the Taunus hills. It spent the medieval period under the Lords of Eppstein, passed to the Counts of Stolberg when that line died out in 1535, and exists today as a small town in Hochtaunus district bordering Frankfurt am Main to the east. For nearly four centuries from 1866 to 1945, it was a peculiar political anomaly: a Hessian enclave inside otherwise Prussian territory, a small island of a different jurisdiction in the middle of the German administrative map.

St.

George's Church preserves what may be the earliest surviving Protestant church building in Germany. The congregation converted to Lutheranism in 1526, during the first generation of the Reformation, and built a church the following decade. The architecture is austere in the way that early Protestant building tended to be, without the ornament that Lutheran builders would later embrace. The town only received formal town rights in 1972, after municipal reform, despite having been continuously inhabited for over a thousand years.