Boston Trivia
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126 free Boston trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
56 free Boston trivia questions with answers. This trivia about Boston runs from the Puritans landing on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 to the Big Dig and the Celtics' eighteenth banner. In between are the Tea Party and the Massacre, Paul Revere's lanterns, the oldest subway in North America, the day a wave of molasses tore through the North End, and the night two fake policemen walked out of the Gardner Museum with a Vermeer. It is written for Bostonians who want to test their local pride, visitors planning a walk along the Freedom Trail, teachers building a unit on the American Revolution, and pub quiz hosts who need a city round. The mix leans easy to medium, with a handful of tough ones on dates, architects and the State House dome. Every answer has been checked against city histories and encyclopaedic sources, so you can repeat them on the Swan Boats without fear of correction.
30 of 126 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Boston was named after a market town in which English county?
Lincolnshire
Boston takes its name from Boston, Lincolnshire, the English market town from which several leading Puritan settlers, including the Rev. John Cotton, had come.
Q 02Boston's founders left Charlestown for lack of what?
Fresh water
Fresh water was so short at Charlestown that the settlers accepted William Blaxton's invitation to share an excellent spring across the river, on the peninsula that became Boston.
Q 03Boston Common, dating from 1634, holds what national distinction?
The first public park in the U.S.
The first public park in the U.S. began as a shared cow pasture, bought from William Blaxton in 1634; cattle went on grazing the Common until 1830.
Q 04Founded in 1635, what is the oldest public school in the United States?
Boston Latin
Boston Latin first met in 1635 in its master's own home; the schoolhouse later built for it gave downtown's School Street its name.
Q 05The oldest subway tunnel in North America, opened in Boston in 1897, runs beneath which thoroughfare?
Tremont
Tremont Street was so clogged with streetcars by the 1890s that the tracks were sent underground; the tunnel was built for trolleys, not trains.
Q 06What did settler William Blaxton call the peninsula on which Boston stands?
Shawmut
Shawmut was Blaxton's alone until he invited the Puritans across in 1630; within five years he had sold them nearly all his land and moved away to what is now Rhode Island.
Q 07Boston's Back Bay neighbourhood was created in the 19th century by doing what?
Filling in tidal marshland
Nearly 600 acres of Charles River marsh were filled with gravel brought by rail from Needham.
Q 08How did many of the men who dumped tea into Boston Harbor disguise themselves?
Mohawk warriors
As Mohawk warriors, the men boarded three ships and spent about three hours hacking open the chests; Parliament answered by closing Boston's port until the tea was paid for.
Q 09Who is remembered as the Boston Massacre's first victim?
Crispus Attucks
Crispus Attucks, thought to have escaped slavery twenty years earlier and gone to sea on whalers, was the first to fall; his body lay in state at Faneuil Hall before the victims were buried in one grave.
Q 10Which future U.S. president defended the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre?
John Adams
John Adams, then a 34-year-old Boston lawyer, defended the British captain and his soldiers at their 1770 trials and won acquittals for all but two, who were branded on the thumb for manslaughter.
Q 11The 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill was mostly fought on which neighbouring Charlestown hill?
Breed's Hill
The colonists fortified Breed's Hill rather than the higher Bunker Hill; the British took it on June 17, 1775, at a cost of more than 1,000 casualties.
Q 12Which Revolutionary War hero laid the Bunker Hill Monument's cornerstone in 1825?
Marquis de Lafayette
The Marquis de Lafayette laid the stone during his farewell tour of America and took home soil from the hill, which covers his grave in Paris.
Q 13Two lanterns hung in the steeple of which Boston church on April 18, 1775, signalling British movements before Paul Revere's ride?
Old North Church
Q 21What tops the Massachusetts State House dome, a nod to early lumbering?
A pine cone
A pine cone tops the dome's lantern; the famous golden dome beneath it began as wooden shingles and was not gilded until 1874.
Q 22A wave of what substance killed 21 people in Boston on January 15, 1919?
Molasses
Molasses burst from a waterfront tank that had leaked ever since it was built in 1915, in a wave moving at about 35 mph that flattened buildings across several blocks.
Q 23Which mythical creature is the emblem of the Boston Athletic Association and appears on Boston Marathon finishers' medals?
Unicorn
The unicorn was adopted by the B.A.A. in 1890, seven years before it staged the first Boston Marathon, now the world's oldest annual one; the club itself calls the reason for the choice a mystery.
Old North Church showed its two lanterns only briefly: the agreed code was one if the regulars marched out by land, two if they crossed the Charles by boat.
Q 14What was Paul Revere's trade?
Silversmith
Paul Revere was a silversmith who also engraved prints, fitted false teeth and, after the Revolution, ran a foundry and a copper mill.
Q 15Which Founding Father was born on Boston's Milk Street in 1706?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, tenth son of a Boston soap and candle maker, slipped away from his apprenticeship in his brother's print shop at 17 and made his name in Philadelphia.
Q 16The USS Constitution, berthed in Charlestown, earned what nickname after defeating HMS Guerriere in 1812?
Old Ironsides
Sailors dubbed her Old Ironsides after British cannonballs appeared to bounce off her thick live-oak hull during the August 1812 victory over HMS Guerriere.
Q 17Faneuil Hall, nicknamed the Cradle of Liberty, is topped by a weathervane in the shape of what?
A grasshopper
A grasshopper of gilded copper, made by Shem Drowne in 1742, is thought to echo the one on London's Royal Exchange, a sign that Boston meant to be a centre of commerce too.
Q 18The Freedom Trail through Boston is marked on the pavement by what?
A red line of bricks
A red line of bricks links the trail's 16 sites; newspaperman Bill Schofield proposed marking the route in a 1951 column, floating names such as 'Puritan Path' and 'Liberty Loop'.
Q 19Which Founding Father is buried in Boston's Granary Burying Ground?
Samuel Adams
Samuel Adams lies in the Granary Burying Ground, named for a grain store that once stood next door; John Hancock and Paul Revere are buried there too.
Q 20Who designed the Massachusetts State House, completed in 1798?
Charles Bulfinch
Charles Bulfinch designed the State House, completed in January 1798; Paul Revere's company sheathed its leaking wooden dome in copper in 1802.
Q 24The Boston Marathon starts in which town?
Hopkinton
Hopkinton has hosted the start since 1924, when the line was moved west from Ashland to lengthen a course that had begun at about 24.5 miles.
Q 25The Boston Marathon is traditionally run on which holiday?
Patriots' Day
Patriots' Day marks the 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19; in 1969 the holiday, and the race with it, moved from that date to the third Monday of April.
Q 26Where did Bobbi Gibb hide before the 1966 Boston Marathon?
Roadside bushes
Roadside bushes hid Gibb until the start: told by letter that women were not physiologically able to run a marathon, she slipped into the field in her brother's shorts and a hooded sweatshirt and became the first woman to finish.
Q 27Fenway Park hosted its first major-league game in April 1912, five days after which disaster?
The sinking of the Titanic
The sinking of the Titanic came on April 15, 1912; five days later the Red Sox beat New York in their new park's first league game, and they went on to win that year's World Series.
Q 28Before it was painted green in 1947, what covered the left-field wall at Fenway Park?
Advertisements
Advertisements covered the 37-foot wall until 1947, when it was painted over in the green that later earned it the name Green Monster; ads only crept back decades afterwards.
Q 29The illuminated Citgo sign that looms beyond Fenway Park's outfield stands over which Boston square?
Kenmore Square
Kenmore Square nearly lost the sign in the early 1980s, when Citgo planned to tear it down; Bostonians protested, the city's landmarks commission stepped in, and it was relit in 1983.
Q 30The Red Sox's 86-year title drought, ended in 2004, was blamed on a curse named after which player?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth, the Bambino, had helped Boston to three titles when owner Harry Frazee, a Broadway producer who was always short of money, sold him to the Yankees after the 1919 season.