Ruthweiler
Ruthweiler is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan, whose seat is in Kusel.
Geography
Location
Ruthweiler lies in the Pfeffelbach valley, also called the Aalbach valley, which here is quite narrow. The village sits on the valley floor at an elevation of roughly 270 m above sea level, and looming above it is the great complex of Castle Lichtenberg, which stretches up to the municipal limit, but actually stands within neighbouring Thallichtenberg’s limits. Breaking through the mountain plateau in a narrow gorge with steep rocky sides is the Pfeffelbach. These crags’ appearance, however, has been altered by man's quarrying activities. Also, the hills on the brook's right bank reach higher than 400 m above sea level while those on the left bank reach roughly 350 m. The continuous woodlands stretch east of the village on the Niederberg. The municipal area measures 332 ha, of which 36 ha is wooded.Neighbouring municipalities
Ruthweiler borders in the northeast on the municipality of Körborn, in the south on the town of Kusel, in the west on the municipality of Pfeffelbach and in the northwest on the municipality of Thallichtenberg.Constituent communities
Also belonging to Ruthweiler is an outlying hospital complex, the Krankenhaus Kusel.Municipality’s layout
Ruthweiler was originally a linear village with the built-up area on the brook's right bank. As early as the 19th century, sidestreets and bulges in the otherwise linear built-up area began to appear. A new building zone arose on the mountain slope over on the left bank. Of the two former estate mills, one is found at the village's upper end and the other at the lower end. In the middle of the village stands the former schoolhouse, now the village community centre. The graveyard lies down the valley at a junction on the road to Kusel. The Krankenhaus Kusel on the east slope of the Heibelberg stands east of the village, but still within its limits, despite its name. Further new building zones are to be opened. 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.History
Antiquity
In the area where Ruthweiler now lies, people had already settled in prehistoric times. Bearing witness to this is an archaeological find: “stump-butted axe with whetted edge, porphyry, length 20 cm. At the discovery site, a fine ash layer and two non-local agate or basalt stones were discovered. It could be a matter of a settlement find.” This stone axe was long held to be the oldest prehistoric archaeological find in the Kusel district, being from the middle of the New Stone Age. 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. The incorrect information stems from a mistake made by local historians from Kusel who deposited the axe in the Town and Local History Museum. 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. In Gallo-Roman times especially, the area was relatively heavily settled, bearing witness to which are finds from the surrounding area.Middle Ages
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. The founding likely actually came later, but certainly long before the village’s first documentary mention. Ruthweiler lay in the Remigiusland and thus became a holding of the County of Veldenz in the early 12th century, and like all villages in this state, ended up in 1444 under the overlordship of the then newly founded County Palatine of Zweibrücken. The village’s first documentary mention in 1267 comes from a taxation book from the monastery on the Remigiusberg. The 1371 document with the name Nyder Rudewilre deals with a border description defining the geographical limits of the Burgfrieden of Castle Lichtenberg. This further shows that at that time, there were two villages, a lower one and an upper one. Ruthweiler's peasants, like those in other villages in the Burgfrieden, had to do compulsory labour for Castle Lichtenberg. Taxes also had to be paid, to the County Palatine as well as the Wörschweiler Monastery and the Counts of Sickingen.Modern times
The time when the County Palatine of Zweibrücken held sway yields more precise information about Ruthweiler. In 1446, winegrowers reaped at the Rudewillr Wingert 3½ Fuder of wine. From 1544 comes an account that tells of a miller named Leonhard from Schweinfurt who held the village's upper mill in Erbbestand. In 1570, Ruthweiler was also liable for taxation to the knight Sir Stumpf of Simmern. Johannes Hoffmann described the village and its environs in his 1588 description of the Oberamt of Lichtenberg. During the Thirty Years' War, neighbouring Castle Lichtenberg was not destroyed, but the surrounding villages suffered greatly under both the war's ravages and the prevailing sicknesses, foremost among these being the Plague. Ruthweiler was utterly destroyed during this war and afterwards had to be settled all over again. Further hardship and woe came in the late 17th century with French King Louis XIV's wars of conquest. In the 18th century, the village once again reached its former size. In 1749, the wooden bridge, which was so often falling into disrepair, was replaced with a stone bridge, and peasants could now reach their plots on the far side of the brook without a problem.Recent times
In connection with the events of the French Revolution, the old feudal structures were swept away and new territorial entities sprang up. During the time of French rule, Ruthweiler belonged to the Mairie of Burglichtenberg, the Canton of Kusel, the Arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the Department of Sarre. After Napoleon’s troops were defeated and driven out of Germany, the victorious powers discussed a new territorial order, and the Congress of Vienna wrought yet another territorial reorganization. In 1816, Ruthweiler passed to the Principality of Lichtenberg. Put together from part of the former Oberamt of Lichtenberg, parts of the former Electorate of Trier and the Waldgraviate-Rhinegraviate, this was a newly created exclave of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, which as of 1826 became the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Its seat was Sankt Wendel, and it was subdivided into the Cantons of Sankt Wendel, Baumholder and Grumbach. Ruthweiler was a border town in this new territorial order, lying right at the principality’s eastern limit. 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. More locally, Ruthweiler lay within the Bürgermeisterei and later Amt of Burglichtenberg. Although the name Burglichtenberg is almost the same as Burg Lichtenberg, the German name for Castle Lichtenberg, the name was not drawn from the castle itself, but rather from a small village that had arisen on the castle grounds after the castle itself had been burnt down in 1799. 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. The remaining 68 municipalities then bore the designation “Restkreis St. Wendel-Baumholder”, with the first syllable of Restkreis having the same meaning as in English, in the sense of “left over”. The district seat was at Baumholder. Ruthweiler belonged to the Restkreis until 1937, when it was transferred to the Birkenfeld district. This was created by uniting the Restkreis with a hitherto Oldenburg district of that same name. The new, bigger district was grouped into the Prussian Regierungsbezirk of Koblenz. After the Second World War, the village at first lay in the Regierungsbezirk of Koblenz in the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate. In the course of administrative restructuring in this state in 1968, the Amt of Burglichtenberg was dissolved on 1 January 1972. Ruthweiler passed to the newly founded Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan and to the Kusel district, in which it remains today. It also found itself in the new Regierungsbezirk of Rheinhessen-Pfalz, although this has since been dissolved.Population development
In earlier days, the Ruthweiler villagers earned their livelihoods mainly at agriculture, though even by the Middle Ages and right up until the French Revolution, Castle Lichtenberg also employed compulsory labourers, day labourers, maidservants and menservants. Since only a few people can today earn a living at farming in Ruthweiler, the village has undergone a shift towards a residential community for people in the most varied of occupations, mostly outside the village. The 1609 Oberamt of Lichtenberg ecclesiastical visitation protocol identified Ruthweiler at that time as being a rather big village. In the course of the Thirty Years' War, though, the wartime ravages and the Plague utterly depopulated the village, and newcomers settled it again, with the population in the years that followed only slowly recovering its numbers. From the late 18th century until the mid 19th century, steady growth was to be noted, but more recently, the trend has been a stagnant one, with population levels hardly changing at all since the 1920s. Nevertheless, this must be considered against the backdrop of a general fall in population in the Kusel district as a whole. 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.The following table shows population development over the centuries for Ruthweiler: