Further important buildings on Hauptstraße are the former bursary office from 1897 (on the far side of the river Glan, and today a police inspectorate) and the town hall from 1829.

[5] Already in prehistoric times, mankind was making its presence felt in the lands around what is now the town of Lauterecken as long ago as 5000 BC, leaving its traces in the form of extensive archaeological finds.

Furthermore, there have been finds from the Iron Age or Hallstatt times, and two barrows that have never been explored, and whose origins have not been determined, also lie within town limits in the Jungenwald (forest).

In Roman times, the area around the town was rather heavily settled, bearing witness to which are the extensive archaeological finds in Medard and Lohnweiler, for instance.

After the Romans, who had occupied the area for more than three centuries, had withdrawn, the Franks began thrusting into the land, advancing their imperial realm well beyond and westwards into what is now France.

The bishops’ power steadily ebbed, although it theoretically remained in place until the old lordly structures were swept away in the time of the French Revolution.

There can, however, be no doubt that there was a castle complex either within the town or nearby that served a mainly defensive purpose rather than that of simply representing the local lords.

In 1393, Count Friedrich III founded an actual Amt of Lauterecken, which he expanded by adding to the hitherto small region the Ämter of Nerzweiler, Reichenbach and Bosenbach.

Belonging to this new Amt were the following places: Albersbach, Aschbach, Bettenhausen, Bosenbach, Eßweiler, Föckelberg, Fockenberg, Gimsbach, Hinzweiler, Hundheim, Jettenbach, Kollweiler, Lauterecken, Limbach, Lohnweiler, Matzenbach, Miesenbach, Mühlbach, Nerzweiler, Neunkirchen am Potzberg, Niedersteegen, Niederstaufenbach, Obermohr, Oberstaufenbach, Obersteegen, Oberweiler im Tal, Reichenbach, Reichenbachstegen, Rothselberg, Rutsweiler am Glan, Schrollbach, Theißberg, Wiesweiler and other places that now no longer exist.

Ludwig II's death from the effects of overindulgence in drink in 1532 at the age of 30 steered the town and Amt of Lauterecken onto a whole new historical course.

Soon afterwards, however, in 1544, Ruprecht died, leaving his own underage son and heir, Georg Johannes I of Veldenz-Lauterecken (known as Jerrihans), whose regency was assumed by Duke Wolfgang.

Jerrihans became a "mistrustful, most whimsical and withdrawn person who constantly had new plans in his head and plotted his sometimes good thoughts and advantageous designs, which, however, owing to a permanent lack of monies, or of trust of others, could not be carried out."

"Georg Hans" did indeed end up in financial trouble, which he sought to overcome, to no avail, with his wife's inheritance, for she was Swedish King Gustav I's daughter.

He borrowed monies from the Lords of Mentzingen and from rich townsmen from the city of Strasbourg, which he could never pay back, and he became entangled in a court case before the Reichskammergericht, which lasted long after his death.

In 1566, the Duke managed to expand the duchy by adding Electoral Palatinate territories, in particular the County of Lützelstein in Alsace, where he later moved the seat of his residence.

Gustav Philipp, the eldest, was, for reasons that are no longer clear today, held prisoner in a tower at the palace in Lauterecken, and in 1679, while fleeing custody, he was shot dead in the Wälderbusch (a wilderness area) near the town.

In the newly established administrative entities that arose after the dissolution of the old feudal structure, Lauterecken lay in the Department of Mont-Tonnerre (or Donnersberg in German) and the Arrondissement of Kaiserslautern, while the town itself became the seat of both a canton and a mairie ("mayoralty") bearing its name.

[11] Neither of those theories, though, explains the origin of the prefix Lauter—; however, another source deals with that by saying that the town is named after the little river, the Lauter, which rises at the northern edge of the Palatinate Forest southeast of Kaiserslautern and flows 35 km down to Lauterecken, where its water – which according to the name was once lauter (meaning "clean", although the word is now obsolete in this sense) – flows into the Glan, coming down from Altenglan, near the middle of town.

Bilstein first crops up in an original document from 1304, and is last mentioned in the mid 16th century, meaning that it might well have vanished even before the Thirty Years' War.

In the time of the Reformation, on orders from the Dukes of Zweibrücken and following the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, everyone in the town had to convert to Lutheran belief.

When towards the end of the 16th century the Duchy converted to Reformed belief, Palatinate-Veldenz did not embrace this newer faith and kept its people with Lutheranism.

The Reformed faith according to John Calvin’s teachings never did play any important rôle, even before the 1818 Protestant Union, although they did for a while have a prayer house at their disposal.

[23] It goes without saying that in days of yore in this former residence town, not only was agriculture, along with winegrowing, well developed, but also service and handicraft businesses had set up shop, too.

The Rheingrafenmühle originally belonged to the Counts of Grumbach, who had been granted leave to use the more favourable water conditions in Lauterecken for a lordly mill.

In Zweibrücken, documents mentioned a lordly brewery in the town and small schnapps distilleries, which obviously went out of business during French Revolutionary or Napoleonic times.

In 1949, the Textilwerk Lauterecken sprang up between the Glan and Bundesstraße 420 as a branch plant of the Vogtland woollen mill in Hof an der Saale.

After the building had long stood empty, it was taken over by the BITO (Bittmann GmbH Lagertechnik) logistics firm whose main location was in Meisenheim.

A major factory that did various kinds of printing was the firm Lony, originally located in town near the former Lower Gate, later moving to the commercial-industrial development on Bundesstraße 420 going towards Medard, and later being taken over by a Swiss consortium.

Further businesses in the northeastern commercial-industrial development on Bundesstraße 420 were the Buhl leatherware factory (which made commercial articles) and the automotive-electric firm Hess/Gabel (Bosch-Dienst).

The end of the Reformation also marked the beginning of schooling, conditioned as it was by the Protestant view that a Christian ought to be able to deal with God's Word in the Bible all by himself.