Maine Trivia
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140 free Maine trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
85 free Maine trivia questions with answers. Maine is the northeasternmost state, the only one that borders just one other state, and the most forested in the country. This quiz covers the whole of it: statehood under the Missouri Compromise, the Popham Colony and the Norse penny, Joshua Chamberlain at Little Round Top, the Pork and Beans War, and the first state ban on alcohol. You will also get the geography and culture people actually argue about: Katahdin and the end of the Appalachian Trail, Acadia and Cadillac Mountain, Portland Head Light and West Quoddy Head, Moosehead Lake, lobster and wild blueberries, whoopie pies and Moxie, L.L.Bean's boot, Stephen King's Bangor, and what 'from away' means. Some questions are easy for anyone who has spent a summer on the coast; a few will only be answered by people who know how many seats are in the state House. Every answer has been checked against a documented source and linked, so you can settle the argument at the table.
30 of 140 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Maine?
Augusta
Augusta grew from a trading post that Plymouth colonists set up on the Kennebec River in the 1620s; it replaced Portland as the seat of government because it lay nearer the middle of the state.
Q 02Which is the only U.S. state that shares a border with Maine?
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is the only one, and the two have quarrelled over the line: in 2001 the Supreme Court threw out New Hampshire's claim to the naval-shipyard island in the river between them.
Q 03Which two Canadian provinces border Maine?
New Brunswick and Quebec
New Brunswick and Quebec meet Maine along a line that the 1783 peace treaty left so unclear that Britain and the United States argued over it for more than half a century.
Q 04Maine became a state in 1820 as part of which famous political bargain?
The Missouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise let Maine in as a free state so that Missouri could follow as a slave state, keeping the Senate evenly split between the two camps.
Q 05Before statehood, Maine was part of which state?
Massachusetts
Massachusetts ran Maine as a district until 1820; its failure to shield the coast from British raids in the War of 1812 swung Mainers behind separation.
Q 06Which reformer, born in Hampden, Maine, in 1802, campaigned across America for humane care of the mentally ill?
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix found her cause while teaching a class in an East Cambridge jail, where she saw mentally ill inmates locked up with criminals; she later ran the Union's army nurses in the Civil War.
Q 07What is Maine's nickname, a nod to its endless forests?
The Pine Tree State
The Pine Tree State put a lone pine on its first state flag in 1901; in 2024 voters turned down a referendum to bring that design back.
Q 08Which seabird did biologists bring back to Maine's Eastern Egg Rock from 1973, luring it ashore with wooden decoys?
Atlantic puffin
Atlantic puffin numbers in Maine were down to two nesting islands when Audubon's Stephen Kress began moving chicks to Eastern Egg Rock; decoys coaxed the grown birds back, and four pairs nested there in 1981.
Q 09The Old Town Canoe Company entered the market building wooden canoes covered in what material?
Canvas
Canvas-covered canoes were Old Town's take on the birch-bark boats of its Penobscot neighbours, and by 1940 they had made the firm the biggest canoe maker in the world.
Q 10Which Maine town is the easternmost municipality in the contiguous United States?
Lubec
Lubec was the scene of a notorious swindle in 1897-98: a clergyman sold stock in a plant he said could draw gold from seawater, then vanished in the summer of 1898, and the fraud was exposed.
Q 11What is the highest mountain in Maine?
Katahdin
Katahdin marks the northern end of the Appalachian Trail, so hikers who set out in spring finish on its summit after walking roughly 2,190 miles.
Q 12The Appalachian Trail runs about 2,190 miles from Maine to its southern end in which state?
Georgia
Georgia's Springer Mountain is the southern end; forester Benton MacKaye proposed the footpath in 1921, and it now crosses 14 states.
Q 13Which is the largest lake in Maine?
Moosehead
Moosehead Lake covers about 116 square miles; the cliffs of Mount Kineo on its shore supplied a flint-like stone that Native toolmakers travelled long distances to collect.
Q 21Which fictional Maine town is terrorised by the shape-shifting entity in the novel 'It'?
Derry
Derry is a thinly veiled Bangor: the author told his biographer that the haunted town is his portrait of the Maine city where he made his home.
Q 22Which poet, author of 'Paul Revere's Ride', was born in Portland in 1807?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow grew up in the first all-brick house in Portland; his sister Anne kept it as it was and willed it to the Maine Historical Society, which opened it to visitors.
Q 23In which Maine town is L.L.Bean headquartered?
Freeport
Freeport's flagship store went round-the-clock in 1951: so many travellers bound for Maine's woods and waters were dropping in at all hours that Leon Bean announced he had 'thrown away the key'.
Q 14Acadia National Park lies mostly on which island off the Maine coast?
Mount Desert Island
Mount Desert Island holds most of the park; a wildfire in October 1947 burned more than 10,000 acres of the park and razed 67 summer estates and five grand hotels in and around Bar Harbor.
Q 15Which philanthropist financed the car-free carriage roads that wind through Acadia National Park?
John D. Rockefeller Jr.
John D. Rockefeller Jr., a skilled horseman, built 45 miles of carriage roads between 1913 and 1940 so that he could cross the island by horse and carriage, away from motor traffic.
Q 16Acadia became a national park in 1919 under the name of which French hero of the American Revolution?
Lafayette
Lafayette National Park was renamed in 1929 to revive Acadia, the old French name for the region.
Q 17Which Acadia summit is famed as the first place in the continental U.S. to see sunrise for part of the year?
Cadillac
Cadillac Mountain was Green Mountain until 1918, when it was renamed for the French adventurer who was once granted the island and later founded Detroit, which is why a car brand shares the name.
Q 18Which U.S. president directed the building of Portland Head Light, Maine's oldest lighthouse?
George Washington
George Washington reminded the masons that the young government was poor, so the tower was raised from stone gathered in nearby fields and on the shore; it was finished in 1791.
Q 19What colour pattern makes the West Quoddy Head lighthouse instantly recognisable?
Red-and-white stripes
Red-and-white stripes mark the 1858 tower on the easternmost point of the contiguous United States; despite the 'West' in its name, the East Quoddy light stands across the water in Canada.
Q 20Which horror author, born in Portland in 1947, set many of his novels in fictional Maine towns?
Stephen King
Stephen King threw the first pages of 'Carrie' in the trash while living in a trailer in Hermon, Maine; his wife Tabitha fished them out and told him to keep going.
Q 24Which single product did L.L.Bean sell when it began as a one-room mail-order business in 1912?
A waterproof hunting boot
A waterproof hunting boot, the Maine Hunting Shoe, was the whole range; 90 of the first 100 pairs came back faulty, and Bean refunded every buyer, the start of his famous guarantee.
Q 25Colonel Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine won fame for holding which position at Gettysburg?
Little Round Top
Little Round Top anchored the far left of the Union line; with ammunition running low, Chamberlain ordered the 20th Maine into a bayonet charge that won him the Medal of Honor.
Q 26Which Mainer served as Abraham Lincoln's first vice president?
Hannibal Hamlin
Hannibal Hamlin was dropped from the ticket in 1864 in favour of Andrew Johnson, so it was Johnson, not Hamlin, who became president when Lincoln was shot the following spring.
Q 27Which Maine senator delivered the 1950 'Declaration of Conscience' speech criticising Joseph McCarthy?
Margaret Chase Smith
Margaret Chase Smith never named McCarthy in the speech, but he hit back by mocking her and her six co-signers as 'Snow White and the Six Dwarfs' and removing her from his investigations subcommittee.
Q 28Maine senator Edmund Muskie, later Secretary of State, championed which landmark environmental law of 1970?
The Clean Air Act
The Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act two years later both carried Muskie's stamp; he had already backed clean air and water laws as Maine's governor in the 1950s.
Q 29The battleship USS Maine blew up in 1898 in which harbour, helping to trigger the Spanish-American War?
Havana
Havana was where the Maine sank; American newspapers blamed Spain and cried 'Remember the Maine!', though the cause of the explosion has never been settled.
Q 30Maine is the largest U.S. producer of which seafood?
Lobster
Lobster stocks are protected by a simple rule: a harvester who traps an egg-bearing female must cut a V-shaped notch in her tail and throw her back, and no one may keep a notched lobster.