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This Huntsville trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the whole story of Alabama's largest city: the 1805 settlement at the Big Spring, the brief run as state capital in 1819, the Union occupation of 1862, the Watercress Capital years, and the 1950 arrival of the German rocket team that turned a cotton town into the Rocket City. You will find questions on Redstone Arsenal, Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and Space Camp, Cummings Research Park, Alabama A&M and UAH, the Trash Pandas and Havoc, Monte Sano, Lowe Mill, Maple Hill Cemetery and the famous people born here, from Tallulah Bankhead to Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. It works for newcomers, longtime locals, and anyone hosting a trivia night in North Alabama. Every answer was checked against a reference page (mostly Wikipedia and official sources) before it went in, and each question carries a short explanation with one extra fact. Difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a few that only a Huntsville lifer will get.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Revolutionary War veteran settled beside the Big Spring in 1805 and gave the city its name?
John Hunt
Hunt built his cabin next to the spring that supplied the town's water for the next century and a half.
Q 02Before its 1812 renaming, Huntsville was briefly named after which English village linked to Alexander Pope?
Twickenham
LeRoy Pope, who bought the land, chose the name to honor his distant kinsman; the name survives today in a downtown historic district.
Q 03In 1819, 44 delegates met in Walker Allen's cabinet-making shop in Huntsville to do what?
Write Alabama's first state constitution
The city then served as the state's first capital when Alabama entered the Union, before the seat moved south.
Q 04Huntsville is the county seat of which Alabama county?
Madison
The city limits also spill over into Limestone, Marshall and Morgan counties.
Q 05During the Great Depression, Huntsville was known as the world capital of which crop?
Watercress
The leafy green thrived in the area's spring-fed streams and was shipped to markets around the country.
Q 06Which Union general seized Huntsville on April 11, 1862, to cut Confederate rail lines?
Ormsby M. Mitchel
Mitchel was an astronomer before the war; the depot his men captured is still standing downtown.
Q 07Which railroad built Alabama's oldest surviving depot, in Huntsville, as its eastern division headquarters?
Memphis and Charleston
During the 1862 occupation the building was used as a prison, and soldiers' graffiti is still visible on the walls.
Q 08In which year was Harrison Brothers Hardware, Alabama's oldest hardware store, established in Huntsville?
1879
The store still operates on the courthouse square and is run by a historic preservation foundation.
Q 09Huntsville Arsenal, the seed of today's Redstone Arsenal, was established in 1941 to produce what?
Chemical weapons
The Army took 35,000 acres beside a town of about 13,000 people; the base's later name refers to the region's red rocks and soil.
Q 10In 1950, Wernher von Braun's German rocket team was transferred to Redstone Arsenal from which Army post?
Fort Bliss, Texas
About 1,000 personnel made the move, including roughly 200 German scientists and engineers, to form the Ordnance Guided Missile Center.
Q 11What was America's first satellite, launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency on January 31, 1958?
Explorer 1
Its instruments were the first to detect the Van Allen radiation belt, and it stayed in orbit until 1970.
Q 12NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center was formed in Huntsville on July 1 of which year?
1960
Some 4,670 civilian employees and 1,840 acres were transferred from the Army to NASA to create it.
Q 13Which president unveiled a bust of George C. Marshall at the Marshall Space Flight Center dedication in 1960?
Dwight Eisenhower
Marshall's widow, Katherine Tupper Marshall, helped him unveil it; the general was the only career soldier to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Q 21The full-scale Saturn V towering over the U.S. Space & Rocket Center was erected in which year?
1999
The model stands nearly twice as tall as the Saturn I beside it; the real Saturn V test vehicle lies horizontally inside the Davidson Center.
Q 22The command module at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center flew on which mission, circling the Moon 64 times in 1972?
Apollo 16
It carried John Young, Charles Duke and Ken Mattingly; Duke was the youngest person ever to walk on the Moon.
Q 23In which city did the wood-and-steel shuttle mockup Pathfinder spend a year on display before 1988?
Tokyo
Built at Marshall in 1977 to check crane loads and roadway clearances, it was restored and rededicated in October 2024.
Q 14Wernher von Braun led Marshall Space Flight Center from 1960 until which year?
1970
He held the director's post through the Saturn V years and departed just months after the first Moon landing.
Q 15Wernher von Braun was born in 1912 in Wirsitz, a town that is today part of which country?
Poland
Then in Prussia, the town is now Wyrzysk; von Braun became a U.S. citizen in 1955.
Q 16Which entertainment figure teamed with Wernher von Braun on the 1955 TV film 'Man in Space', seen by about 40 million?
Walt Disney
The broadcast helped sell the American public on spaceflight three years before NASA existed.
Q 17What is the popular nickname of the Lunar Roving Vehicle developed at Marshall?
Moon Buggy
The same Huntsville center was responsible for the Space Shuttle's main engines, boosters and external tank, and now runs the Space Launch System program office.
Q 18The HOSC at NASA's Huntsville center doubles as the payload operations center for which orbiting outpost?
International Space Station
Huntsville controllers coordinate science experiments aboard the station around the clock, every day of the year.
Q 19The U.S. Space & Rocket Center opened to the public on March 17 of which year?
1970
The museum was von Braun's idea; it is owned by the state and run by the Alabama Space Science Exhibit Commission.
Q 20Space Camp, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center's famous youth program, was founded in which year?
1982
Von Braun proposed the idea in 1977 after watching students take notes on a museum tour; a 1986 movie later doubled attendance in a single year.
Q 24Cummings Research Park in Huntsville ranks where among research parks in the United States by size?
Second largest
It is also the fourth largest in the world, hosting about 300 companies; Brown Engineering was the first tenant when the zoning was created in 1962.
Q 25Huntsville's 2020 census population, Alabama's largest, was closest to which figure?
215,000
The count of 215,006 also placed it 100th among U.S. cities, passing Birmingham for the state's top spot.
Q 26Huntsville sits in the valley of which river?
Tennessee
The city is ringed by plateaus and mountains, and its official elevation is 577 feet.
Q 27Monte Sano, the peak that rises east of downtown Huntsville, has a Spanish name meaning what?
Mountain of health
In 1877 a 233-room Queen Anne health resort opened on its summit, where a week's stay cost $11.
Q 28Monte Sano State Park, which opened in 1938, was largely built by which New Deal program?
Civilian Conservation Corps
Its crews built the amphitheater, lodge and rustic stone cottages that are still rented out today across the park's 2,140 acres.
Q 29Burritt on the Mountain, atop Monte Sano, is centered on a mansion built in which decade?
1950s
The site pairs the house with an interpretive historic park, nature trails and overlooks of the city.
Q 30Major General Mikio Kimata gave Huntsville's red Japanese friendship bridge to mark which occasion?
The 1976 U.S. Bicentennial
Kimata had studied at Redstone Arsenal's missile school in the 1960s and had already donated 60 Yoshino cherry trees as thanks; the bridge was dedicated May 3, 1977.