The municipality lies in the Vulkaneifel, a part of the Eifel known for its volcanic history, geographical and geological features, and even ongoing activity today, including gases that sometimes well up from the earth.

The bedrock under Schönbach is made up of greywacke, a mineral of the Rheinisches Schiefergebirge (Rhenish Slate Mountains), which formed 360,000,000 years ago out of the ooze on the floor of the Devonian Sea.

They passed through the dale as hunter-gatherers and later settled, as witnessed by the ringwalls on the Hommerich and the Steineberger Ley, local peaks.

The document itself, thus dated, deals with Arnold von Daun’s yearly payment of 7 Gulden to Burkhard von Vinstigen, Lord of Schönecken, and his wife Blanchflor from his half of an estate at Schonnbach; he also enfeoffed Burkhard with this holding.

After the Thirty Years' War, Schönbach belonged to the Electoral-Trier Amt of Daun (actually beginning in 1357).

In the wake of the French Revolution in 1789, German armies invaded France, but were not only repulsed, but also overwhelmed on their own soil.

This put an end to the Electorate of Trier and indeed, all lands on the Rhine’s left bank then found themselves under French rule as a result of the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio.

Farmers owned little enough livestock without the sicknesses that struck both cattle and swine in these years, which not only decimated herds but also raised the price of meat.

Furthermore, a column of 40,000 Russian troops who passed through the needy region in May 1814 on their way back home to Russia did not help matters.

In 1882, sixteen children in Schönbach – and many more in the district as a whole – died in an outbreak of scarlet fever, literally decimating the village, whose population had been 160.

Heading the board that oversaw this undertaking was Peter Hab and the treasurer was Rudi Röder, both from Schönbach.

The municipality's arms might in English heraldic language be described thus: Argent a bend sinister wavy azure between a cross gules and an inescutcheon of the same charged with nine bezants, three, three and three.

The red cross refers to Schönbach's former allegiance to the Electorate of Trier as part of the Amt of Daun from 1357.