[4] Ruthweiler was originally a linear village (or by some definitions, a “thorpe”) with the built-up area on the brook's right bank.

Alongside the road once ran the Kusel-Türkismühle railway line, which was built in 1936 and closed in 1969, and whose right-of-way is now used as a hiking and cycling trail.

Bearing witness to this is an archaeological find: “stump-butted axe with whetted edge, porphyry, length 20 cm.

Author Bantelmann, who wrote the above quotation, wrongly states that the discovery site lay within the town of Kusel, but the axe was actually found in a loam pit on the east slope of the Heibelberg in the area where the Westpfalzklinikum II was later built.

Had this mistake not been made, the axe's official discovery site would have been in Ruthweiler, and thus on the other side of what was at the time a Regierungsbezirk boundary, which in turn would have required the artefact to be kept at a museum in Trier.

Furthermore, archaeological finds in neighbouring municipalities show that people in the area in prehistoric times did not merely stay temporarily.

[7] Regional historians have determined that Ruthweiler’s founding date was sometime in the 8th or 9th century, putting it in the time when the Franks were newly settling the land.

[8] The time when the County Palatine (later Duchy) of Zweibrücken held sway yields more precise information about Ruthweiler.

During the time of French rule, Ruthweiler belonged to the Mairie (“Mayoralty”) of Burglichtenberg, the Canton of Kusel, the Arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the Department of Sarre.

As part of this state, Ruthweiler passed in 1834 by sale – the price was 2,100,000 Thalers – to the Kingdom of Prussia, which made this area into the Sankt Wendel district in the Rhine Province.

Later, after the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles stipulated, among other things, that 26 of the Sankt Wendel district's 94 municipalities had to be ceded to the British- and French-occupied Saar in 1919.

Ruthweiler passed to the newly founded Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan and to the Kusel district, in which it remains today.

It could be that Ruthweiler's population levels have been holding steady rather than shrinking because the village lies right near the district seat of Kusel.

[13][14] As one of the villages within the Castle Lichtenberg Burgfrieden, people from Ruthweiler always attended services at the church at Castle Lichtenberg, which from the Middle Ages to early modern times was Saint George’s Chapel, and as of 1758 the newly built church near the tithe barn.

Beginning in 1588, Count Palatine Johannes I forced all his subjects to convert to Reformed belief as espoused by John Calvin.

Although the Catholic faith was once again allowed after the Thirty Years' War, Evangelical Christians have retained their majority down to the present day.

The village's Roman Catholics, as guided by their historical development, belong to the deaconry of Sankt Wendel in the Diocese of Trier.

[16] Ruthweiler's mayor is Sven Dick (elected on 7 June 2009), and his deputies are Alfred Weber and Lothar Schwarz.

The charge in the upper field, the lion, is drawn from the heraldic device once borne by the Counts of Veldenz, who were once the local lords.

[18][19] The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate’s Directory of Cultural Monuments:[20] Ruthweiler holds its kermis (church consecration festival) on the first weekend in July.

[23] Ruthweiler has opened four new building areas, including the first one in the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel financed by a private investor, “Borrech”.

As a result of the Reformation and the efforts to afford believers access to the Bible, the Protestant rulers in general tried to further the cause of schooling.

All the good intentions that went into these initiatives in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, however, were annihilated in the ravages of the Thirty Years' War.

Listed on the castle steward's 1671 chart (23 years after the war ended) are three pupils from Ruthweiler, fewer than half the village's school-aged children.

In 1834, the then Amtsbürgermeister Sohns bought the former state scrivener's office at Castle Lichtenberg at auction to have a school set up inside it for schoolchildren from Burglichtenberg, Thallichtenberg and Ruthweiler.

Since Thallichtenberg was now also asserting ownership rights on the schoolhouse in Ruthweiler and was demanding a financial adjustment, a court case ensued that was put to an end only after the Second World War by a compromise.

After Ruthweiler was grouped into the Kusel district in 1969, primary school pupils attended classes in Pfeffelbach.