 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.