Tennessee
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
128 free Tennessee trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
79 free Tennessee trivia questions with answers. Tennessee packs a lot into one long, thin state: the birthplace of country music and of rock and roll, the Secret City that enriched uranium for the atomic bomb, the deciding vote for women's suffrage, the most-visited national park in America and a whiskey distillery in a county where you cannot buy a drink. This quiz covers all of it, from statehood and the Civil War to hot chicken, MoonPies, the Grand Ole Opry, the Titans, the Vols and the strange stories behind Ruby Falls, Reelfoot Lake and the Peabody ducks. The questions start easy (which state shares the Smokies, which president lived at the Hermitage) and climb to genuinely hard ones about Oak Ridge, the State of Franklin and the Sultana disaster, so natives and visitors both get their moment. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation is shown under each explanation, so a family argument about whether the Volunteer State really borders eight others can be settled on the spot. Play it solo, use it as a Tennessee round for a trivia night, or hand it to the out-of-towners before a Nashville bachelorette weekend.
30 of 128 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which state joined the Union as the 15th, four years before Tennessee became the 16th in 1796?
Kentucky
Kentucky joined on June 1, 1792; Tennessee followed four years later to the day, once a census showed the Southwest Territory had enough people to become a state.
Q 02Tennessee earned its Volunteer State nickname for the men who signed up to fight in which conflict?
The War of 1812
The War of 1812 earned Tennessee the name for the rush of men who signed up; it stuck in 1846, when a call for under 3,000 soldiers for the Mexican War drew about 30,000 Tennessee volunteers.
Q 03Tennessee's name is traced to Tanasi, a town belonging to which Native American nation?
Cherokee
Cherokee people lived at Tanasi on the Little Tennessee River; the name passed from their town to the river and then to the state, though what the word first meant is uncertain.
Q 04Tennessee borders eight other states, a record it shares with which state?
Missouri
Missouri also has eight neighbors, Tennessee among them; Tennessee reaches its eight because it runs in a long strip from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River.
Q 05What do the trio of white stars on Tennessee's flag represent?
Its three Grand Divisions
Its three Grand Divisions, East, Middle and West Tennessee, each get a star, and the unbroken circle around them shows the three bound together as one state.
Q 06In July 1866 Tennessee became the first former Confederate state to do what?
Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment
Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment: Tennessee did so in July 1866, and within days Congress seated its members again, so it escaped the military rule later imposed on the other ex-Confederate states.
Q 07The Ku Klux Klan was founded just after the Civil War in which small Tennessee town?
Pulaski
Pulaski is where a group of Confederate veterans started the Klan as a social club soon after the war; it quickly turned into a terror organization that spread across the South.
Q 08Which Founding Father, namesake of a breakaway East Tennessee state, said he was 'too little acquainted' with it to help?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was the breakaway State of Franklin's namesake; asked for his backing, he replied that, having been in Europe when it formed, he was 'too little acquainted' with its affairs to offer advice.
Q 09Whose note made Tennessee legislator Harry Burn switch to 'yes' on the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920?
His mother
His mother, Febb Burn, wrote telling him to 'be a good boy' and vote for suffrage; his switch made Tennessee the 36th state to ratify, completing the Nineteenth Amendment.
Q 10The 1925 Scopes 'Monkey Trial' over the teaching of evolution was held in which Tennessee town?
Dayton
Dayton's boosters staged the test case as a publicity stunt to put their town on the map; it worked, as Chicago's WGN carried it live, the first radio broadcast of an American trial.
Q 11John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined how much?
$100
Scopes was fined $100, but the Tennessee Supreme Court later threw out the conviction on a technicality: the judge, not the jury, had set the amount.
Q 12Which president signed the act creating the Tennessee Valley Authority in May 1933?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the TVA Act on May 18, 1933, as an early New Deal measure; two years earlier Herbert Hoover had vetoed a bill to let the government make and sell power at Muscle Shoals.
Q 13Which TVA dam, the agency's first, is named for a Nebraska senator who championed public power?
Norris Dam
Q 21What piece of the Ryman followed the Opry to its new home in 1974?
A six-foot circle of oak flooring
A six-foot circle of oak flooring from the Ryman stage was set into the new Opry House stage in 1974, so performers stand on the same boards Hank Williams played.
Q 22The Ryman Auditorium, later home of the Opry, was built in 1892 by a riverboat captain as what?
A gospel tabernacle
Thomas Ryman, a riverboat captain converted at a Sam Jones tent revival, built the Union Gospel Tabernacle in 1892; it was renamed for him after his death in 1904.
Q 23Nashville's full-scale replica of the Parthenon was originally built for which 1897 event?
Norris Dam honors George W. Norris of Nebraska, who fought through the 1920s to keep the federal dam at Muscle Shoals in public hands; TVA broke ground on it in October 1933, months after the agency was created.
Q 14In December 2008 an earthen dike failed at TVA's Kingston plant, releasing 1.1 billion gallons of what?
Coal ash slurry
Coal ash slurry, about 1.1 billion gallons of it, burst from a failed dike on December 22, 2008, covering some 300 acres and swamping homes along the Emory River.
Q 15Oak Ridge was built from scratch in 1942 for what purpose?
To enrich uranium for the atomic bomb
Oak Ridge was built to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb as the Manhattan Project's headquarters; uranium from its plants went into 'Little Boy', the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.
Q 16Roughly how many people lived in Oak Ridge by 1945, three years after its founding?
75,000
75,000 people lived in the 'Secret City' by 1945, enough to make it the fifth-largest city in Tennessee, because its wartime plants needed tens of thousands of workers.
Q 17Which element, number 117, was named in 2016 for the state home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory?
Tennessine
Tennessine ends in -ine because element 117 sits in group 17 with halogens such as chlorine and iodine; the name credits Oak Ridge, Vanderbilt and the University of Tennessee for their superheavy element research.
Q 18The Grand Ole Opry began in November 1925 as a barn dance on which Nashville radio station?
WSM
WSM's call letters stood for the slogan of the station's owner, National Life and Accident Insurance: 'We Shield Millions'; the WSM Barn Dance first aired November 28, 1925.
Q 19Which Tennessean was the only senator from a seceding state to keep his seat in 1861?
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson, a Greeneville tailor turned senator, refused to follow Tennessee out of the Union in 1861; Lincoln made him military governor in 1862 and his running mate in 1864.
Q 20What distinction does the Grand Ole Opry hold in American broadcasting?
Longest-running radio broadcast in US history
It is the longest-running radio broadcast in US history, on the air weekly since November 28, 1925, when 77-year-old fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson opened the first barn dance.
The state's Centennial Exposition
The state's Centennial Exposition of 1897 had a plaster Parthenon as its showpiece; when the temporary building crumbled, Nashville chose in 1920 to rebuild it in concrete, finishing in 1931.
Q 24Which Greek goddess stands about 42 feet tall, covered in gold leaf, inside Nashville's Parthenon replica?
Athena
Athena, sculpted by Nashville's Alan LeQuire, was unveiled ungilded in 1990; it took twelve more years of fundraising before she got her gold in 2002, to match the ancient original in Athens.
Q 25Francis Nash, for whom Nashville was named in 1784, was what?
A Revolutionary War general
Francis Nash was a Revolutionary War general, mortally wounded at Germantown in October 1777; the settlement had begun in 1779-80 as Fort Nashborough.
Q 26Nashville's city government merged in 1963 with the government of which county?
Davidson
Davidson County and Nashville became a single Metropolitan Government in 1963; voters had turned the merger down in a 1958 referendum before approving a second charter in 1962.
Q 27The 1960 downtown Nashville sit-in campaign targeted what?
Segregated lunch counters
Segregated lunch counters in downtown stores were the target from February 13, 1960; after a shoppers' boycott and the bombing of lawyer Z. Alexander Looby's home, six stores began serving Black customers on May 10.
Q 28Nashville hot chicken is traditionally served on top of what?
White bread with pickle chips
White bread with pickle chips is the classic plate under chicken coated in a paste of lard and cayenne pepper; the dish spread so far that KFC put its own version on menus nationwide in January 2016.
Q 29What is true of Moore County, home of the Jack Daniel's distillery in Lynchburg?
Alcohol sales are prohibited there
Alcohol sales are prohibited there because Moore County has stayed dry since Tennessee's prohibition laws of the early 1900s; a special state law lets the distillery sell commemorative bottles to visitors.
Q 30Jack Daniel's is dripped through ten-foot stacks of charcoal made from which wood before barrelling?
Sugar maple
Jack Daniel's drips through ten feet of sugar maple charcoal, the 'Lincoln County Process' that Tennessee law has required of Tennessee whiskey since 2013 and that sets it apart from bourbon.