Chattanooga Trivia
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This Chattanooga trivia quiz has 95 free questions with answers and covers the Scenic City from Ross's Landing to Gig City: the Cherokee origins and the Trail of Tears, the 1863 battles on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the Walnut Street Bridge, the Dynamo of Dixie and Glenn Miller's Choo Choo, the first Coca-Cola bottler and the MoonPie, Ruby Falls, Rock City and the Incline Railway, the Tennessee Aquarium, Volkswagen, EPB's gigabit internet, Bessie Smith and the Lookouts. Questions run from easy ones any local can answer to details that will test a lifelong Chattanoogan, so it works for a trivia night on the Southside, a school unit on Tennessee history, or a visitor who has just ridden the Incline. Difficulty is marked on every question. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the city and its landmarks, and each question shows its citation.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Chattanooga is the seat of which Tennessee county?
Hamilton
Hamilton County, named for Alexander Hamilton, had its seat at Harrison until 1870, when Chattanooga, which had far outgrown it, took over.
Q 02What is Chattanooga's official nickname?
The Scenic City
The Scenic City is the official nickname, a nod to the mountains, ridges and valleys around the town; River City is one of several unofficial ones.
Q 03The name Chattanooga is thought to come from a Native American phrase meaning what?
Rock rising to a point
Rock rising to a point is the usual reading, though the origin is uncertain; the rock is thought to be nearby Lookout Mountain.
Q 04The landing that became Chattanooga was established by which future Cherokee Principal Chief?
John Ross
John Ross's riverside warehouse supplied Cherokee and settlers alike, and the settlement that grew around it was called Ross's Landing until it took the name Chattanooga.
Q 05Which Union general led the November 1863 Battles for Chattanooga that broke the Confederate siege?
Ulysses S. Grant
Rosecrans's Army of the Cumberland had been bottled up in the city since its defeat at Chickamauga in September.
Q 06Which Confederate commander besieged the Union army in Chattanooga in autumn 1863?
Braxton Bragg
Braxton Bragg took the blame when his army was routed from the heights above the city, and he gave up its command only days later.
Q 07The supply route Grant opened to feed the starving Union troops in Chattanooga was nicknamed what?
The Cracker Line
The Cracker Line stayed open because Joseph Hooker's men beat off a Confederate counterattack at Wauhatchie, and food began reaching the hungry garrison.
Q 08On November 25, 1863, Grant's army routed the Confederates in a charge up which high ground east of the city?
Missionary Ridge
Missionary Ridge fell when George Thomas's men, ordered only to take the rifle pits at its base, kept charging to the top without orders.
Q 09Ed Johnson's 1906 lynching in Chattanooga led which court to hold its only criminal trial?
The US Supreme Court
The US Supreme Court had agreed to hear Johnson's appeal; when a mob lynched him anyway, the justices tried Sheriff Joseph Shipp for contempt and sent him to jail.
Q 10Which Chattanooga bridge, closed to cars in 1978, reopened in 1993 for pedestrians only?
Walnut Street Bridge
Walnut Street Bridge sat in disrepair for years after it closed to traffic, until a renovation turned the old truss into a walkway between downtown and North Chattanooga.
Q 11By the 1930s Chattanooga's factories had earned it which nickname?
The Dynamo of Dixie
The Dynamo of Dixie was the boast of a factory town that had boomed since Union officers returned after the Civil War to exploit the region's iron.
Q 12Which bandleader's orchestra took "Chattanooga Choo Choo" to number one in December 1941?
Glenn Miller
Glenn Miller and his orchestra introduced the song in the 1941 film Sun Valley Serenade, and the record reached number one on December 7, the day of Pearl Harbor.
Q 13"Chattanooga Choo Choo" holds what distinction in music-industry history?
First song to receive a gold record
Q 21MoonPies are traditionally paired with which drink?
RC Cola
The pairing is a Southern classic; coconut MoonPies appear for Mardi Gras.
Q 22The Tennessee Aquarium opened on the Chattanooga riverfront in which year?
1992
Its Ocean Journey building was added in 2005; it houses more than 12,000 animals.
Q 23The Tennessee Aquarium's original 1992 building is called what?
River Journey
River Journey traces the Tennessee River from its Appalachian headwaters downstream to the Mississippi Delta; the saltwater Ocean Journey building was added beside it in 2005.
Ruby Falls, found inside Lookout Mountain in 1928, was named after its discoverer's what?
First song to receive a gold record: RCA Victor presented the award in 1942, after the single had sold more than a million copies.
Q 14In the lyrics of "Chattanooga Choo Choo", where does the singer board the train?
Track 29
Track 29 is the lyric's platform, yet New York's Pennsylvania Station, where the singer boards, had only 21 tracks.
Q 15The Chattanooga Choo Choo Hotel is housed in which renovated building?
Terminal Station
Terminal Station opened in 1909, lost its passenger trains in 1970 and was reborn three years later as a hotel complex named for the song.
Q 16In 1969 the federal government gave Chattanooga what unwelcome distinction?
Dirtiest air in the nation
Dirtiest air in the nation: the mountains that ring the city trapped the smoke from its factories, which settled over the streets.
Q 17In September 2010 Chattanooga became the first US city to offer what through its city-owned utility EPB?
Municipal one-gigabit internet
Municipal one-gigabit internet rode on the fibre-optic network EPB was building for a smart electric grid, and it earned the city the nickname Gig City.
Q 18Which German carmaker opened a $1 billion assembly plant in Chattanooga in 2011?
Volkswagen
Volkswagen had built no cars in America since closing its Pennsylvania factory in 1988; the Chattanooga plant ended that 23-year gap with a Passat designed for the US market.
Q 19In 1899 Chattanooga businessmen won the exclusive rights to bottle which famous soft drink?
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola's owner Asa Candler saw so little future in bottles that he signed the rights away for a dollar he never collected, and Chattanooga got the first franchised bottling plant.
Q 20Which marshmallow-and-graham-cracker snack is made by the Chattanooga Bakery?
The MoonPie
The MoonPie, the bakery's story goes, was born in 1917 when a Kentucky coal miner asked a travelling salesman for a snack "as big as the moon".
Wife
Wife Ruby gave the falls her name: her husband was sinking an elevator shaft toward a cave cut off by a railway tunnel when his crew broke into an unknown passage that led to the waterfall.
Q 25Which chemist and cave enthusiast's company found Ruby Falls while drilling for another cave?
Leo Lambert
Leo Lambert wanted to reopen a storied cave that a railway tunnel had sealed, so he sank an elevator shaft from above and struck a new cavern on the way down.
Q 26Rock City's long-running boast is that a visitor at Lover's Leap can see seven what?
States
States is the claim, though a University of Tennessee geography professor asked to check it knew of no study that proved it and doubted the farthest ones could still be seen.
Q 27From 1935 Rock City advertised itself across the South with "See Rock City" painted on what?
Barn roofs
Barn roofs were Clark Byers's canvas: hired in 1935, he painted the slogan on more than 900 barns across the South and Midwest over the next three decades.
Q 28Rock City is actually across the state line in which state?
Georgia
Georgia holds far more of Lookout Mountain than Tennessee does: the mountain leaves Chattanooga, crosses Georgia's northwest corner and ends in Alabama, and Rock City sits just over the line.
Q 29The Lookout Mountain Incline Railway has a maximum grade of about what?
72.7 per cent
That makes it one of the world's steepest passenger railways; it opened in November 1895.
Q 30The Incline Railway runs from which historic Chattanooga neighbourhood to the summit of Lookout Mountain?
St. Elmo
St. Elmo, at the foot of the mountain, takes its name from Augusta Evans's bestselling 1866 novel St. Elmo, which she set in the area after visiting it.