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60 free Obscure Presidential trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This obscure presidential trivia quiz skips the famous stuff. There is no question about who was first, who was assassinated or who resigned. Instead you get the president who took his oath from his own father by kerosene lamp at 2:47 a.m., the one who personally hanged a murderer as a county sheriff, the one who had a tumour cut out of his jaw on a friend's yacht and kept it secret for decades, the vice president who was sworn in in Cuba, and the president whose grandson was still alive in 2025. The questions run from the Founders (Washington's distillery and dentures, Jefferson's swivel chair, Adams's last words) through the forgotten 19th-century presidents (Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Johnson, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley) to modern deep cuts on Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden. Most sit at hard or expert difficulty; a few easier ones are there so a table does not go scoreless. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia biographies and each question shows its source, so the weird facts here are ones you can defend at trivia night.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which president was the first Catholic to hold the office and, at 43, the youngest ever elected?
John F. Kennedy
His book Profiles in Courage won a Pulitzer Prize, and his PT-109 rescue earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.
Q 02Which president is the only one who never married?
James Buchanan
His orphaned niece Harriet Lane served as White House hostess; he claimed he stayed single out of devotion to a fiancée who had died young.
Q 03Which president was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013?
Donald Trump
He had appeared at WrestleMania 23 in 2007 and was the only president to reach the office with neither government nor military service.
Q 04Which president was the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review?
Barack Obama
He spent part of his childhood in Jakarta, Indonesia after his mother married an Indonesian graduate student.
Q 05Which president is the only one to hold a patent, for a device to lift boats over river shoals?
Abraham Lincoln
Patent No. 6,469 was granted in 1849; he later gave lectures on the patent system and worked as a patent lawyer on the mechanical reaper case.
Q 06Which president was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize?
Theodore Roosevelt
The 1906 Peace Prize rewarded his brokering of the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War.
Q 07Harry Truman's middle initial 'S' stands for what?
Nothing in particular
It honoured both grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young, without choosing between them.
Q 08Which president is the only one to have married inside the White House, in the Blue Room in 1886?
Grover Cleveland
His bride, Frances Folsom, was 21, making her the youngest First Lady in history; he had been her late father's law partner and had watched over her upbringing.
Q 09Which president was the last to wear facial hair in office?
William Howard Taft
The 335-pound president was also the first president buried at Arlington National Cemetery and the only one to later serve as Chief Justice.
Q 10Which president never went to school and learned his trade as a tailor's apprentice?
Andrew Johnson
Born into poverty, he was apprenticed to a tailor as a boy and rose from alderman to the White House.
Q 11Which inventor tried to locate the assassin's bullet inside a dying president in 1881 with a metal detector?
Alexander Graham Bell
The device worked on other people but failed on the president, possibly confused by the metal bedsprings beneath him.
Q 12Which president was the first to fly in an aeroplane, a four-minute Wright flight in 1910?
Theodore Roosevelt
He was out of office by then, having handed over to Taft; the flight took place at an air meet in St. Louis.
Q 13Which president was born in Kinderhook, New York, in a community that spoke Dutch as its first language?
Martin Van Buren
Q 21Which president was the youngest US Navy pilot when commissioned in 1943, and was shot down over Chichijima?
George H. W. Bush
Several airmen shot down in the same raid were captured and executed; he was rescued by a submarine and went on to captain Yale's baseball team.
Q 22Which president was sworn in by his own father, a notary public, by kerosene lamp at 2:47 a.m.?
Calvin Coolidge
News of Harding's death reached the family farm at Plymouth Notch, Vermont in the middle of the night; the new president took the oath in the parlour and went back to bed.
Q 23Which president was known as 'His Accidency'?
John Tyler
The town nickname 'Old Kinderhook' is one popular theory for the origin of the expression 'OK'.
Q 14Which president had electricity installed in the White House but feared touching the switches?
Benjamin Harrison
The 'Centennial President' and his wife often slept with the lights on; staff turned them off in the morning.
Q 15What were John Adams's last words on 4 July 1826, unaware his old rival had died hours earlier?
Thomas Jefferson survives
Both Founders died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration; the friend he named had in fact died several hours before him at Monticello.
Q 16Which piece of furniture is Thomas Jefferson credited with creating?
The swivel chair
He also sold his personal library to the government for $23,950 to restart the Library of Congress after the British burned it in 1814.
Q 17Which president operated a whiskey distillery at his estate to supplement his income?
George Washington
The Mount Vernon distillery, run by enslaved workers, was one of the largest in the young country; the site has been rebuilt and makes rye again.
Q 18Which president survived an 1835 assassination attempt at the Capitol when both pistols misfired?
Andrew Jackson
Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, was subdued; the 67-year-old president reportedly went at him with his cane.
Q 19Which president was born William Jefferson Blythe III, three months after his father died in a car crash?
Bill Clinton
He took his stepfather's surname as a teenager, and later discovered his parents' marriage had been bigamous.
Q 20Which president memorised lines by Emerson and Yeats to overcome a childhood stutter?
Joe Biden
Elected to the Senate at 30, he commuted from Delaware by train for 36 years and picked up the nickname 'Amtrak Joe'.
The Whigs expelled him from the party and nearly his whole cabinet resigned; he fathered fifteen children, the last of them when he was 70.
Q 24Which former president died in the Capitol in 1848, two days after collapsing on the House floor?
John Quincy Adams
He had spent 17 years as a congressman after leaving the White House, leading the fight against the gag rule on anti-slavery petitions.
Q 25One president went blind in his left eye while in office, a fact kept secret for years. What caused it?
A boxing injury
He kept sparring in the White House until a partner hit him hard enough to detach a retina; the fact was hidden for years.
Q 26Which president was called 'His Fraudulency' after a commission awarded him 20 disputed electoral votes?
Rutherford B. Hayes
The deal that ended Reconstruction gave him a one-vote Electoral College win; his teetotal White House earned his wife the nickname 'Lemonade Lucy'.
Q 27Which president was the third to die on the Fourth of July, in 1831?
James Monroe
Adams and Jefferson had both died on the same day five years earlier; Liberia's capital, Monrovia, is named for this president.
Q 28The first president's dentures were never wood. Which of these materials WAS used?
Teeth bought from slaves
His dentist John Greenwood used brass, lead, gold, animal teeth and human teeth; by his 1789 inauguration he had a single natural tooth left.
Q 29Which president was born with his first and middle names in the opposite order from the one we know?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The golf-mad general later had his golf balls painted black so he could play in the snow at Camp David.
Q 30Which president is the only Eagle Scout to have held the office?
Gerald Ford
Born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in Omaha, he was renamed after his stepfather and later survived two assassination attempts 17 days apart.