From the Early Middle Ages, Schneppenbach belonged to a major landhold of Saint Maximin's Imperial Abbey at Trier.

Until the 18th century, Schneppenbach was administratively tightly bound with the Schmidtburg (castle), which nowadays stands within the village's municipal limits.

The castle, whose beginnings go back at least as far as 929, and possibly as far as 926, is one of the oldest in the Nahe-Hunsrück region and is believed to have been the family seat of the Counts in the Nahegau, the Emichones.

Internal Waldgravial family disputes, however, resulted in ownership being transferred about 1330 to Archbishop and Elector of Trier Baldwin of Luxembourg.

While Bundenbach was the only village in the Amt that stood wholly under Electoral-Trier sovereignty, Bruschied and Schneppenbach formed a condominium and belonged jointly to the Electorate of Trier and the Knights of Wildberg.

Schneppenbach passed to the then newly founded Mairie ("Mayoralty") of Kirn in the Arrondissement of Simmern and the Department of Rhin-et-Moselle, remaining there for the rest of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic times.

Like many places in the region, Schneppenbach can claim to have had its dealings with the notorious outlaw Schinderhannes (or Johannes Bückler, to use his true name).

On 25 February 1799 at five o'clock in the morning, the Gendarmerie raided the Budzliese-Amie, a house nestled in rustic charm in Schneppenbach, and there managed to arrest Schinderhannes.

The event is commemorated in Carl Zuckmayer's play Schinderhannes in the song "Schinderhanneslied": "Im Schneppenbacher Forste, da geht der Teufel rumdibum...".

The buckle refers to the Family Schenk von Schmidtburg, whose painted coat of arms can be seen at the Koblenz State Archive (Abt.

After consent by the state archive, the Ministry of the Interior in Mainz granted approval for Schneppenbach to bear its own arms on 8 October 1981.

[12] The following are listed buildings or sites in Rhineland-Palatinate's Directory of Cultural Monuments:[13] The chapel in Schneppenbach, which stands under monumental protection, was built in 1768 by the Salm-Kyrburg court master builder Johann Thomas Petri, whose plans also yielded many lordly buildings dating from the 18th century in the Kirn area.

After excavations and shoring-up work on the ruin that had been almost thoroughly overgrown, visitors now have a clear picture of the imposing complex's size and former importance.

Up above the village, at 568 m and right next to the legendary Teufelsfels ("Devil's Crag") stands a lookout tower bearing the same name as this quartzite butte in the Lützelsoon.

The village lies, along with the neighbouring ones, just north of a well known European language boundary, the so-called Das-Dat line, south of which people speak Rhine Franconian.

The local folklore includes an old story supposedly still told by the elderly inhabitants of the villages at the foot of the Lützelsoon:Not a very long time ago, a few forestry workers were busying themselves planting oaks when one of them brought to light a gold belt with his hoe.