The municipality lies, like its neighbours Dittweiler and Frohnhofen, in the Kohlbach valley in the Western Palatinate.

The graveyard used today lies at the village's north end on the Kohlbach's right bank.

Besides the village street network, there is also the thoroughfare, Sankt Wendeler Straße (Landesstraße 335), which has newer buildings on it, and which runs along the Kohlbach's left bank.

[5] In prehistoric times, there were already people in what is now Altenkirchen, bearing witness to which are archaeological finds from neighbouring municipalities.

[6] Altenkirchen lay within the free Imperial Domain (Reichsland) around the town and castle of Kaiserslautern.

The background to this statement is that the Remigiusberg and the Remigiusland were holdings of Reims, but under ecclesiastical organization, they belonged to the Archbishopric of Mainz.

Beginning in 1437, the court of Kübelberg, and along with it the village of Altenkirchen, belonged to the Electoral Palatinate Oberamt of Kaiserslautern until the late 18th century.

[7] From the year 1542, a Weistum (cognate with English wisdom, this was a legal pronouncement issued by men learned in law in the Middle Ages and early modern times) from Altenkirchen has been preserved, according to which the successors of the then already late Junker Hans Blick von Lichtenberg from Bad Dürkheim, in the presence of, among others, the Landschreiber (in Electoral Palatinate, this was an official at the Oberamt level who had certain accounting and legal responsibilities), Job Weidenkopf from Lichtenberg Castle, held farming rights, and the Schultheiß, Heinrich Korb von Kübelberg collected the fees.

Like all the villages in the area, Altenkirchen, too, suffered greatly from the effects of the harrowing Thirty Years' War, which, it is said, left Altenkirchen with only five families by the time it ended, whereas many local villages in the Kusel area had been utterly wiped out in the war.

Newcomers to the area settled in Altenkirchen, thus building the population back up, but then came more war in the late 17th century as King Louis XIV's French troops swept across the land, leaving devastation behind them.

Zweibrücken times, however, did not last very long, for the whole feudal system that had shaped life was swept away by the events of the French Revolution.

In 1793, the first French Revolutionary troops appeared in the region, and in 1801, France annexed the lands on the Rhine’s left bank.

[8] In 1814, the French withdrew from the German lands on the Rhine's left bank, and Altenkirchen was at first assigned to the Ottweiler district.

The administrative structures that had arisen in Napoleonic times were swept aside and Altenkirchen was then assigned to the Landkommissariat of Zweibrücken.

In 1818, the village became the seat of its own Bürgermeisterei (“mayoralty”) to which Dittweiler and Frohnhofen (and at first also Breitenbach) also belonged, and which lay in the canton of Waldmohr and the Landkommissariat (later Bezirksamt, and then Landkreis, or district) of Homburg.

In 1848 and 1849, the Kohlbach valley, where Altenkirchen lies, hosted a centre of the Revolutionary movement, in which the schoolteacher Daniel Hirsch is worthy of mention for, among other things, having founded a popular association.

After the First World War, the district of Homburg was grouped into the French- and British-ruled Saar Mandate, but the canton of Waldmohr remained in the Free State of Bavaria (the German monarchy had been overthrown, and Bavaria's last king had abdicated), and thus still within Germany.

One prominent figure in the growth of the Altenkirchen coalmining industry was Johann Paul Weiß from Saxony, who, before his arrival in Altenkirchen, had been undertaking important activities in the Electoral Palatinate mining establishment, and he had even brought experienced miners from his homeland to the Palatinate.

Achtweiler was mentioned in a document in 1571, but all that now bears witness to Staßweiler's existence is rural cadastral toponyms.

[1] The municipality's arms might be described thus: Argent a church affronty gules, the helm-spire azure, the door and windows Or ensigned with a cross of the same, the chief per fess Or and sable.

[14] The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments:[15] Altenkirchen holds a village festival on the first weekend in July.

The church consecration festival, locally known as the Kerwe, goes back to the year 1839 and is held on the first weekend in October.

[17] Originally, the village's commercial life was oriented towards agriculture, in which sweet cherry growing, begun in 1742, promoted by Elector Karl Theodor, played a role.

Beginning in the mid 18th century, coal for household heating was also mined within municipal limits, at first only for a few families’ needs, but later very extensively.

In 1775, the Elector Palatine bestowed bequests upon the mine foremen Meixner and Weiß, thereby starting the more extensive phase of local coalmining.

Hirsch himself was deemed to be a hardworking and successful teacher, but because of his participation in the 1849 Badish-Palatine Uprising, he was fired, and in 1850, he emigrated to the United States.

[20] A clergyman's son from Altenkirchen, he attended the grammar school at Kaiserslautern and the Bipontinum at Zweibrücken, going on to study natural sciences in Munich.

1709 in Rutsweiler an der Lauter; d. 1796 in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, USA) Later known as John Peter Miller, or simply Peter Miller, before leaving Germany in 1730, he lived for a few years as a boy in Altenkirchen, where his father, Johann Müller, was the minister.