Louisville Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Louisville trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
68 free Louisville trivia questions with answers. Louisville, Kentucky is far more than the first Saturday in May. This quiz walks the whole city: the 1778 landing that started it, the canal dug around the Falls of the Ohio, the flood of 1937, the West Main Street block where the bourbon trade lived, and the museums, parks and neighborhoods that make it a place people actually visit. You'll also find the sports and food that put the city on the map: the family woodshop that hand-carved a bat for a slumping star, the boy whose stolen bicycle produced a heavyweight champion, the hotel sandwich covered in Mornay sauce, and the University of Louisville's championships and medical firsts. Famous natives from a Supreme Court justice to a chart-topping rapper round it out. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia, official sites and primary sources before publishing, and each question carries its citation. Difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a handful of questions only a lifelong Louisvillian would get, so it works equally well for a trivia night, a classroom, or a solo test of your hometown pride.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Louisville was named for which French king, whose soldiers were then aiding the American Revolution?
Louis XVI
Louis XVI never saw his namesake city, but a marble statue of him, a gift from its French sister city Montpellier, stood downtown until 2020, when it was moved into storage after being damaged during protests.
Q 02Which Revolutionary War officer is credited as the founder of Louisville in 1778?
George Rogers Clark
George Rogers Clark paid for much of his campaign with borrowed money that Virginia never repaid in his lifetime; creditors took most of his land and he died nearly penniless.
Q 03Where did the settlers who founded Louisville first land in 1778?
Corn Island
Corn Island no longer exists: once its trees were felled and its rock was quarried for cement, the river wore it down to a bed of rock, and the place where Louisville began now lies under water.
Q 04What did Louisville do in January 2003 that more than doubled its official population overnight?
Merged with its surrounding county
Merged with its surrounding county: earlier merger plans had failed in 1956, 1982 and 1983, and the combined Louisville Metro government finally took office in January 2003 under Mayor Jerry Abramson.
Q 05Louisville is Kentucky's largest city, but which far smaller city is the state capital?
Frankfort
Frankfort won the capital in 1792, early histories say, by offering the new state a log house to meet in, town lots, building supplies and $3,000 in gold; it still has fewer than 30,000 residents.
Q 06Which pair received a hero's homecoming at Louisville's Locust Grove estate in November 1806?
Lewis and Clark
Lewis and Clark reached Locust Grove on 8 November 1806, back from the Pacific, and the Clark family threw them a party there: the estate belonged to Clark's sister Lucy Croghan and her husband.
Q 07The Louisville and Portland Canal, opened in 1830, was dug to bypass what obstacle?
The Falls of the Ohio
The Falls of the Ohio, a long run of rapids, blocked the river: except at high water, boats had to unload above them and reload below, which is why a city grew up on the spot.
Q 08After a modernization in the early 1960s, the Louisville and Portland Canal was renamed what?
McAlpine Locks and Dam
McAlpine Locks and Dam honours William McAlpine, an Army Corps district engineer at Louisville; the canal had opened in 1830 as a private toll company in which Congress bought shares, and Washington later bought out the rest.
Q 09During the 1937 flood, Louisville rescuers took under a day to build a floating escape bridge out of what?
Empty whiskey barrels
Empty whiskey barrels kept an 1,800-foot pontoon bridge afloat between flooded downtown and the higher ground of the Highlands, at a time when about 70 percent of the city was under water.
Q 10In the 1917 case Buchanan vs. Warley, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down what Louisville law?
A residential segregation ordinance
A residential segregation ordinance barred Black residents from moving onto white-majority blocks; Louisville NAACP president William Warley's offer to buy such a lot brought the case, and the justices struck the law down unanimously.
Q 11Opened in 1905, Louisville's Western Branch was the first US public library run entirely by and for whom?
African Americans
African Americans staffed and used the branch, which began in three rented rooms of a private home; its head, Thomas Fountain Blue, went on to train Black librarians sent to Louisville by other Southern cities.
Q 12On March 27, 1890, Louisville's downtown was nearly destroyed by what?
A tornado
A tornado ploughed through the business district that evening; at least 44 of the dead were in one hall on West Market Street that collapsed with a lodge meeting upstairs and a children's dancing class below.
Q 13Which U.S. president is buried in a national cemetery on Brownsboro Road in Louisville?
Q 21Which Louisville company manufactures the Louisville Slugger bat?
Hillerich & Bradsby
Hillerich & Bradsby gained its second name in 1916, when salesman Frank Bradsby was made a partner; it sold the Louisville Slugger brand to Wilson in 2015 yet still turns the bats in its own Louisville factory.
Q 22Roughly how tall is the giant baseball bat that leans against the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory?
120 feet
120 feet tall, the Big Bat is not wood at all: it is hollow steel, weighs 68,000 pounds, and is an exact scale-up of the 34-inch Louisville Slugger that Babe Ruth swung.
Q 23What souvenir does every visitor receive at the end of the Louisville Slugger factory tour?
A miniature bat
Zachary Taylor
Zachary Taylor grew up near Louisville; in 1991 his remains were lifted from the vault there to test a theory that he had been poisoned, and the arsenic found was far too little to have killed him.
Q 14Churchill Downs takes its name from what?
The family that leased the land for the track
The family that leased the land for the track were the Churchills: two brothers rented 80 acres to their nephew, who formed the Louisville Jockey Club and built the course on it.
Q 15Which horse won the very first Kentucky Derby in 1875?
Aristides
Aristides was only entered to set the pace for his better-fancied stablemate Chesapeake; when Chesapeake never got going, the owner waved the jockey on and the supposed pacemaker won.
Q 16Which event opens the Kentucky Derby Festival, usually two weeks before the race itself?
Thunder Over Louisville
Thunder Over Louisville began in 1989 as a modest daytime fireworks show at the opening ceremonies; it now pairs a day-long air show with one of North America's largest annual fireworks displays.
Q 17The Belle of Louisville steamboat was originally launched in 1914 under what name?
Idlewild
Idlewild was renamed Avalon in 1947 and had fallen into disrepair by 1962, when a county judge bought the steamboat for $34,000 and the city rechristened her the Belle of Louisville.
Q 18What trophy does the winning boat take home from Louisville's Great Steamboat Race, held days before the Derby?
A set of antlers
A set of antlers: for decades the Belle of Louisville and the Delta Queen raced for the Golden Antlers, which were retired when the Queen bowed out, so today's winner is handed the Silver Antlers instead.
Q 19By company legend, the first Louisville Slugger was turned in 1884 for which slumping Louisville Eclipse star?
Pete Browning
Pete Browning got three hits with the new bat the next day, the story goes; his own nickname was 'the Louisville Slugger', the name the bat makers registered as their trademark in 1894.
Q 20Which star became the first player to endorse a bat when he signed with Louisville Slugger in 1905?
Honus Wagner
Honus Wagner had begun his big-league career in Louisville itself, with the Colonels in 1897; when that club folded two years later, its president took him along to the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The museum sits on the downtown stretch locals call Museum Row.
Q 24What everyday misfortune first steered 12-year-old Cassius Clay toward boxing in Louisville?
His bicycle was stolen
His bicycle was stolen, a red-and-white Schwinn; the policeman he reported it to, Joe Martin, also trained boxers and told the furious boy he had better learn to fight before he took on the thief.
Q 25In Muhammad Ali's 1975 autobiography, where does he throw his Olympic gold medal after a Louisville diner refuses him service?
Into the Ohio River
Into the Ohio River, the book says, though friends denied the story, one biographer says he simply lost the medal, and Ali himself later disowned the tale; he was handed a replacement at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Q 26Which of these is one of the six core principles the Muhammad Ali Center is built around?
Spirituality
Spirituality joins confidence, conviction, dedication, giving and respect on the list; Ali's own faith cost him dearly in 1967, when he refused the draft on religious grounds and was stripped of his title.
Q 27Louisville's airport code is SDF, a holdover from what former name?
Standiford Field
Standiford Field was the airport's official name for decades; it was renamed for Louisville native Muhammad Ali in 2019, three years after his death, yet the old three-letter code stayed put.
Q 28Louisville's airport is among the busiest US cargo airports because it hosts which company's worldwide hub?
UPS
UPS calls the hub Worldport; by the mid-2020s it could sort some 416,000 packages an hour and had made the company one of Kentucky's biggest employers, with more than 20,000 workers.
Q 29Which Louisville cemetery is the burial place of Muhammad Ali, Colonel Sanders and the city's founder?
Cave Hill
Cave Hill, laid out from 1848, doubles as an arboretum of nearly 300 acres; the Colonel was buried there in the white suit and black string tie he wore in public for the last twenty years of his life.
Q 30A Hot Brown, Louisville's signature open-faced sandwich, is smothered in which sauce?
Mornay
Mornay, a cheese sauce, is poured over the turkey and toast and browned under the broiler; the Brown Hotel's chef devised the dish in 1926 for late-night dancers who wanted something grander than ham and eggs.