Charleston Trivia
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99 free Charleston trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Charleston trivia questions with answers. Charleston, South Carolina has been a pirate target, the richest city in the colonies, the place the Civil War started and, more recently, a food and travel obsession. This quiz covers all of it: Charles Town in 1670, Blackbeard's blockade, the palmetto-log fort, the 1780 siege, Fort Sumter and the Hunley, the 1886 earthquake and Hurricane Hugo, plus Rainbow Row, single houses and piazzas, joggling boards, the Angel Oak, Gullah culture, she-crab soup, Spoleto, the Citadel and the College of Charleston. Because 'Charleston trivia' means different things to different people, there are also questions on the Charleston dance craze of the 1920s and on Charleston, West Virginia, the state capital on the Kanawha. Questions run from easy ones for first-time visitors to hard ones for people who can pronounce 'Chalston' properly. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question shows its source. Good for a Lowcountry-themed quiz night, a classroom unit on South Carolina, or a rainy afternoon on the piazza.
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Q 01Which late-night host grew up on James Island in Charleston, the youngest of 11 children?
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert has said he decided as a boy to lose his Southern speech because television used it as shorthand for dim characters, so he copied the delivery of news anchors instead.
Q 02Charleston takes its name from which English king, on the throne when it was founded in 1670?
Charles II
Charles II had granted Carolina to eight loyal supporters in 1663, soon after regaining his throne; their settlers founded Charles Towne in 1670 and moved it to the present peninsula in 1680.
Q 03The first battle of the American Civil War was fought at which harbour stronghold?
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter: Confederate batteries under P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire at 4:30 a.m. on 12 April 1861, and Major Robert Anderson, outgunned and nearly out of supplies, surrendered the next day.
Q 04Which Confederate vessel became the first submarine to sink a warship, off Charleston in 1864?
H. L. Hunley
The H. L. Hunley sank the USS Housatonic on 17 February 1864, then went down with all eight crew. Raised in 2000, she is kept at a conservation center in North Charleston.
Q 05Which adventure novelist funded the dive team that found Charleston's lost Confederate submarine in 1995?
Clive Cussler
Clive Cussler turned NUMA, the fictional agency of his novels, into a real one paid for by his royalties; its divers found the wreck under silt off Charleston, and it was raised in 2000.
Q 06Which East Bay Street block did Dorothy Legge start painting pink in 1931?
Rainbow Row
Rainbow Row: neighbours copied Legge's pastel paint along a block that had fallen into disrepair after the Civil War, and the spread of colours gave the row its name.
Q 07Church steeples that dominate Charleston's low skyline are popularly linked to which city nickname?
The Holy City
The Holy City is usually explained by the steeples and by the colony's early religious tolerance, but the phrase itself was coined only in the 20th century.
Q 08What creole language and culture developed among enslaved Africans' descendants on the Sea Islands?
Gullah
Gullah grew out of the rice plantations: planters paid more for captives from West Africa's Rice Coast who knew the crop, and the islands' isolation helped their descendants keep African speech and customs.
Q 09Which Charleston speciality is finished with a splash of dry sherry as it is served?
She-crab soup
She-crab soup is named for the orange roe of the female crab; it is thought to descend from Scottish partan bree, and local legend has a mayor's butler adding the roe to dress it up for President Taft.
Q 10Which composer founded Charleston's late-spring arts festival in 1977 as a US twin of one he ran in Italy?
Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti founded Spoleto Festival USA in 1977 as an American counterpart to his Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, choosing Charleston for its wealth of churches and theatres.
Q 11Which novelist's cadet years inspired The Lords of Discipline?
Pat Conroy
Pat Conroy graduated from Charleston's military academy in 1967; his thinly veiled novel opened a rift with the school that lasted until it gave him an honorary degree in 2000.
Q 12Who was the first woman admitted to the Corps of Cadets at Charleston's military academy in 1995?
Shannon Faulkner
Shannon Faulkner won a court fight of more than two years to join the all-male corps, then left within a week; Nancy Mace became its first female graduate in 1999.
Q 13Which Charleston school, founded in 1770, did the city take over in 1837 and run with public funds?
College of Charleston
Q 21Which pirate blockaded Charleston in May 1718, leaving only when given a chest of medicine?
Blackbeard
Blackbeard held Charleston's harbour for about a week in May 1718, seizing ships and hostages until Governor Johnson handed over a chest of medicines. His sometime partner Stede Bonnet was hanged in Charleston that December.
Q 22Sullivan's Island, where many enslaved Africans first landed, is often likened to which arrival point?
Ellis Island
Ellis Island: an estimated 40% of enslaved Africans brought to North America came in through Charleston, many held first in quarantine 'pest houses' on Sullivan's Island.
Q 23Which tree's spongy logs absorbed British cannonballs at Fort Sullivan in June 1776?
Palmetto
College of Charleston: it had shut down in 1836 amid quarrels between trustees, faculty and students, until the mayor stepped in and it reopened as one of the nation's earliest city-funded colleges.
Q 14The Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, opened in 2005 over the Cooper River, links Charleston with which town?
Mount Pleasant
Mount Pleasant: the 2005 bridge replaced two older Cooper River spans, and its towers are flanked by man-made rock islands meant to ground a stray ship before it can hit them.
Q 15Which category 4 hurricane came ashore just north of Charleston in September 1989?
Hugo
Hugo made landfall at Sullivan's Island around midnight on 21–22 September 1989, and its storm surge wrecked the beach towns there and on neighbouring Isle of Palms.
Q 16In a Charleston single house, what does the door facing the street actually open onto?
The piazza
The piazza: the street door is only a screen between the sidewalk and the long side porch, and the true front door stands halfway along it, on the long side of the house.
Q 17Charleston's City Market is famous for baskets hand-coiled from which native grass?
Sweetgrass
Sweetgrass baskets descend from the wide 'fanner' trays that enslaved Africans coiled to winnow rice; makers turned to sweetgrass around 1900, as work baskets gave way to show baskets for sale.
Q 18Which giant live oak on Johns Island, centuries old, shades an area of about 17,000 square feet?
Angel Oak
Angel Oak is named for the Angel family, who once owned the land, though local folklore tells of spirits appearing as angels around it; the City of Charleston now keeps it as a public park.
Q 19Mother Emanuel, the Charleston congregation attacked in 2015, holds what distinction?
Oldest AME church in the South
Oldest AME church in the South: its first building was destroyed after the 1822 Vesey plot, and when the congregation rebuilt after the Civil War the architect was Denmark Vesey's own son.
Q 20Denmark Vesey, who planned an 1822 uprising in Charleston, had bought his freedom with what?
Lottery winnings
Lottery winnings: Vesey won $1,500 in a Charleston lottery in 1799 and paid $600 of it for his freedom, but he was never able to buy his wife Beck and their children out of slavery.
Palmetto logs, soft and spongy, soaked up British cannonballs on 28 June 1776. The fort was renamed for its commander, William Moultrie, and the palmetto went on to the state flag and seal.
Q 24Which Seminole leader died as a prisoner at Fort Moultrie in 1838 and is buried at its gate?
Osceola
Osceola, seized under a flag of truce in Florida in 1837, died at Fort Moultrie on 30 January 1838; the Army buried him at the fort's front gate.
Q 25Benjamin Lincoln, who surrendered Charleston in 1780, was later chosen to accept the British surrender at which battle?
Yorktown
Yorktown: losing Charleston and its army was among the worst American defeats of the war; when Cornwallis sent a deputy with his sword, Washington had him hand it to his own deputy, Lincoln.
Q 26Which disaster on 31 August 1886 left many old Charleston houses braced with iron bolts?
Earthquake
Earthquake: the shock of about magnitude 7, felt as far away as Boston and Cuba, badly damaged the city's brick buildings; owners ran iron rods through the walls rather than pull them down.
Q 27A Charleston institution founded in 1773 is widely regarded as America's first what?
Museum
Museum: the Charleston Museum began as an offshoot of the Charleston Library Society, gathering specimens of local natural history, yet it did not open to the public for another half-century.
Q 28Which Charleston theatre, rebuilt in the 1930s inside the old Planter's Hotel, revives the name of a 1736 colonial playhouse?
Dock Street Theatre
Dock Street Theatre: the original opened in 1736 with The Recruiting Officer, and when New Deal crews rebuilt it inside the derelict hotel, the same comedy was staged for the 1937 reopening.
Q 29Charleston's Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim is the American birthplace of which movement?
Reform Judaism
Reform Judaism in America began here in 1824: when the trustees rejected members' petition for prayers in English, they broke away as the Reformed Society of Israelites, whose ideas the congregation later took up.
Q 30Which 1925 novel, later an opera, is set on Charleston's fictional 'Catfish Row'?
Porgy
Porgy: DuBose Heyward's novel became a play and then an opera; he and George Gershwin spent the summer of 1934 at Folly Beach, near Charleston, working on Porgy and Bess.