Virginia Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
This Virginia trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers the whole Commonwealth: Jamestown and the House of Burgesses, the eight presidents born in the state, Yorktown, Richmond as Confederate capital and Appomattox, the split with West Virginia, Loving v. Virginia, Arlington and the Pentagon, Monticello and Mount Vernon, Colonial Williamsburg, Shenandoah's Skyline Drive, the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, Virginia Beach, the Chincoteague ponies and the state symbols from the cardinal to the dogwood. It suits Virginia history classes, pub quizzes in Richmond or Norfolk, and anyone who wants to test how well they know the Old Dominion beyond the tourism slogan. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries and official sources before publishing.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Jamestown, founded in 1607, holds what distinction?
First permanent English settlement in the Americas
First permanent English settlement in the Americas. It nearly was not: after the 'Starving Time' winter of 1609-10 the survivors had already sailed away when an incoming relief fleet turned them back.
Q 02Which crop, pioneered by John Rolfe from 1612, made the Virginia colony profitable?
Tobacco
Tobacco. The local leaf was too bitter for English taste, so Rolfe planted a sweeter West Indian strain, and its sales in England turned the struggling colony into a paying venture.
Q 03Virginia's elected colonial legislature, which grew out of the 1619 Jamestown assembly, was known as what?
The House of Burgesses
The House of Burgesses. In 1619 the elected burgesses sat in a single body with the governor and his council; they became a chamber of their own in the 1640s and met until 1776.
Q 04Virginia is named after which English monarch?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I. The name dates from Walter Raleigh's 1584 expedition and is generally taken to honour the 'Virgin Queen', though it may also echo the name of a local leader, Wingina.
Q 05How many US presidents were born in Virginia, more than any other state?
Eight
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, William Henry Harrison, Tyler, Taylor and Wilson; Ohio is next with seven.
Q 06Which city is the capital of Virginia?
Richmond
Richmond has been the capital since the government moved from Williamsburg during the Revolution; its State Capitol was designed by Thomas Jefferson on the model of the Maison Carrée at Nîmes.
Q 07Which is Virginia's most populous city?
Virginia Beach
Virginia Beach, with about 460,000 people at the 2020 census. It became the state's largest city only in the 1980s, two decades after the small resort town merged with the whole of Princess Anne County.
Q 08Where did the Jamestown settlers first make landfall in April 1607 before moving upriver?
Cape Henry
Cape Henry. The colonists raised a wooden cross on the dunes and named the spot for the king's elder son before sailing on to choose the site of Jamestown.
Q 09Virginia ratified the US Constitution on 25 June 1788, becoming which state to join the Union?
Tenth
Tenth: Virginia's convention ratified 89-79 on 25 June 1788, four days after New Hampshire had become the ninth state and put the Constitution into effect.
Q 10Where did Patrick Henry deliver his 'Give me liberty, or give me death!' speech in March 1775?
St. John's Church, Richmond
St. John's Church, Richmond. Henry spoke without notes and no transcript survives: the famous words were reconstructed some forty years later by his biographer, William Wirt.
Q 11Which British general surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October 1781?
Cornwallis
Cornwallis. Trapped between Washington's army and a French fleet, he pleaded illness on the day and sent his deputy, Charles O'Hara, to hand over the sword.
Q 12Who set the fires that burned much of Richmond's business district when the Confederate capital fell in April 1865?
Retreating Confederate troops
Retreating Confederate troops. Ordered to burn bridges and supply warehouses as they left, they started a blaze that swept the centre, and it was the arriving Union soldiers who put it out.
Q 13In whose parlour at Appomattox Court House did the Confederate commander surrender to Grant on 9 April 1865?
Wilmer McLean
Q 21George Washington's Potomac estate was named after whom?
A British admiral
A British admiral: Washington's half-brother Lawrence named the estate for Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, under whom he had served in the 1741 Cartagena expedition.
Q 22Which philanthropist bankrolled the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg from the late 1920s?
John D. Rockefeller Jr.
John D. Rockefeller Jr. Won over by a local rector, W. A. R. Goodwin, he at first bought up the old town's houses quietly, so that word of his plans would not push prices up.
Q 23Why did Virginia move its capital inland from Williamsburg to Richmond in 1780?
Fear of British attack
Wilmer McLean. His farm at Manassas was caught up in the war's first big battle; he moved south, and four years later the war all but ended in his new front parlour.
Q 14Why did Virginia's north-western counties break away to form West Virginia during the Civil War?
They opposed secession
They opposed secession. When Virginia voted to leave the Union in 1861, the north-western counties set up a rival loyal government at Wheeling, and their new state was admitted in June 1863.
Q 15The Supreme Court's 1967 Loving decision struck down Virginia's law against what?
Interracial marriage
Interracial marriage. Richard and Mildred Loving were woken in their bedroom by the sheriff in 1958; a judge gave them prison or 25 years out of Virginia, and after years in exile they went back to court.
Q 16The Pentagon, headquarters of the US Department of Defense, is in which Virginia county?
Arlington
Arlington. The building has five sides because its first planned site there was hemmed into that shape; Roosevelt moved the project down the road but kept the design.
Q 17Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864 on land confiscated from which Confederate general's family?
Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee. The estate was his wife's; the Union took it in a wartime tax sale after refusing the payment her agent offered, because she had not brought it in person, and burials began in 1864.
Q 18Which two US presidents are buried in Arlington National Cemetery?
Taft and Kennedy
Taft and Kennedy. Every president is entitled to a grave there as a former commander-in-chief, yet only these two have taken one, William Howard Taft in 1930 and John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Q 19Jefferson's home Monticello takes its name from Italian words meaning what?
Little mountain
Little mountain. The name already belonged to a favourite boyhood hilltop on land Jefferson inherited at 21, and in 1768 work began on a house at its summit.
Q 20Which US coin shows Monticello on its reverse?
The nickel
The nickel. Felix Schlag won the 1938 design contest and its $1,000 prize, only for the Mint to make him redraw his angled view of Monticello as the head-on one still in use.
Fear of British attack. Richmond lay beyond the reach of British warships and nearer the settlers moving west, yet within a year Benedict Arnold's raiders had taken the town with barely a fight.
Q 24The College of William & Mary, chartered in 1693, is the second-oldest US college after which?
Harvard
Harvard. Virginia had planned a college as early as 1618, but the scheme died with the 1622 attack on the colony, and Massachusetts opened its own first, in 1636.
Q 25Which founding father established the University of Virginia in 1819?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson founded the university in 1819 and designed its Academical Village and Rotunda, which share a UNESCO World Heritage listing with his home Monticello.
Q 26Which is Virginia's official state bird?
Northern cardinal
Northern cardinal. Seven states have chosen it, more than any other bird, and its name comes from the red robes worn by cardinals of the Catholic Church.
Q 27Which breed is Virginia's official state dog?
American Foxhound
American Foxhound. George Washington helped create the breed, crossing his own pack with French hounds sent to him as a gift by the Marquis de Lafayette.
Q 28Which spirit is Virginia's official state spirit?
George Washington's Rye Whiskey
George Washington's Rye Whiskey. His farm manager talked him into distilling, and by 1799 the Mount Vernon stills were making 11,000 gallons a year; the distillery was rebuilt in 2007.
Q 29Virginia's tourism slogan, in use since 1969, says that the state 'is for' whom?
Lovers
Lovers. The first drafts read 'Virginia is for history lovers', 'beach lovers' and 'mountain lovers'; the agency thought that too limiting and simply dropped the first word.
Q 30The world's largest naval base is in which Virginia city?
Norfolk
Norfolk. The Navy took over the old grounds of the 1907 Jamestown Exposition there in 1917, shortly after the United States entered the First World War.