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50 free Wilmington NC trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Wilmington NC trivia questions with answers. Wilmington NC trivia for locals, UNCW students, transplants and anyone who has walked the riverwalk. The quiz runs from the town's 1739 founding and the world's longest railroad, through Fort Fisher and the fall of the last Confederate port, the 1898 coup, the WWII shipyard and the Battleship North Carolina, to the modern city: Michael Jordan's Laney High years, Dino De Laurentiis's studio and the shows it made ('Hollywood East'), the Azalea Festival, Airlie Gardens, the Bellamy Mansion, Thalian Hall, Hurricane Florence, the Seahawks and the Venus flytrap that grows nowhere else on earth. Easy questions any resident will get come first; later ones will test a Cape Fear historian. It works as a trivia-night round downtown or a family game on the way to Wrightsville Beach. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and carries its source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Wilmington sits on which North Carolina river?
Cape Fear
The Cape Fear River, a 191-mile blackwater river, meets the Atlantic just below the city; Wilmington's downtown Riverwalk runs about 1.75 miles along its bank.
Q 02Wilmington is the county seat of which county?
New Hanover
Wilmington is the seat of New Hanover County, formed in 1729 and named for the British royal House of Hanover; the 2020 census counted 115,451 residents in the city itself.
Q 03The city was named in 1739 for Spencer Compton, who held what title?
An earldom
He was the 1st Earl of Wilmington; Colonel William Bartram, uncle of the naturalist, introduced the bill and named the town for his patron.
Q 04What is Wilmington's nickname?
The Port City
Wilmington is called the Port City: the state port on the river has handled ocean shipping since colonial days and is North Carolina's largest.
Q 05The Wilmington and Weldon, completed in 1840, held what world record?
Longest single rail line
At 161.5 miles the Wilmington and Weldon was the longest single rail line in the world when finished in 1840; it later became part of the Atlantic Coast Line.
Q 06Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city until which city overtook it in 1910?
Charlotte
Charlotte passed Wilmington in the 1910 census; through the late 19th century Wilmington, then a majority-Black city, had been the state's most populous.
Q 07The events of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington are described as the only what in United States history?
A successful coup d'etat
Historians call the 1898 Wilmington insurrection the only successful coup d'etat in US history: armed white supremacists forced the elected biracial Fusionist government to resign and burned the Black-owned Daily Record.
Q 08How large was the mob that overthrew Wilmington's elected government in 1898?
About 2,000
About 2,000 armed white men marched on November 10, 1898, burning the Daily Record office and forcing the mayor, aldermen and police chief to resign.
Q 09Fort Fisher, guarding the approach to Wilmington's port, was nicknamed the Southern what?
Gibraltar
Fort Fisher's massive earthen walls earned it the name 'Gibraltar of the South'; it fell to a Union land-sea assault on January 15, 1865, and the city followed on February 22.
Q 10Why was the fall of Wilmington in February 1865 so damaging to the Confederacy?
It closed the South's last Atlantic port
Blockade runners had kept Lee's Army of Northern Virginia supplied through the port; Braxton Bragg abandoned the city at 1 a.m. on the 22nd.
Q 11What was the nickname of the WWII battleship now a memorial across from downtown?
Showboat
USS North Carolina (BB-55) was nicknamed 'Showboat' by sailors after her showy 1941 shakedown runs in and out of New York; she earned 15 battle stars, the most of any US battleship in the war.
Q 12How many main guns did the memorial battleship BB-55 carry?
Nine 16-inch
Nine 16-inch guns in three triple turrets formed her main battery; USS North Carolina, lead ship of her class of fast battleships, was commissioned in April 1941.
Q 13How many ships did the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company build in Wilmington between 1941 and 1946?
243
The yard launched 243 ships between 1941 and 1946, 126 of them Liberty ships; employment peaked at about 21,000 workers in 1943.
Q 21Which Marvel film began shooting at Wilmington's studios in May 2012?
Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3 began principal photography at EUE/Screen Gems in Wilmington in May 2012 and went on to gross more than $1.2 billion worldwide.
Q 22David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) used Wilmington's studio and streets to play which fictional town?
Lumberton
Lumberton is the fictional town, sharing its name with a real North Carolina city; Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper starred, and the film shot on the new Wilmington studio lot in 1985.
Q 23The North Carolina Azalea Festival was first held in Wilmington in which year?
1948
Q 14Which basketball legend grew up in Wilmington and was cut from his high school varsity as a sophomore?
Michael Jordan
Michael Jordan, about 5 feet 11 as a sophomore, was left off the varsity roster; he went on to hit the winning shot in the 1982 NCAA final and win six NBA titles with the Bulls.
Q 15Which local high school did the future Bulls star attend?
Emsley A. Laney
Emsley A. Laney High School, named for a longtime county school board chairman, is where he played; he made the Laney Buccaneers varsity as a junior after a season on junior varsity.
Q 16Which Italian producer built Wilmington's film studio in 1984?
Dino De Laurentiis
Dino De Laurentiis, fresh from shooting Firestarter in the area, opened his DEG studio lot on North 23rd Street in 1984; it later became Carolco Studios and then EUE/Screen Gems.
Q 17The Wilmington Ten, pardoned in 2012, had been convicted of what 1971 crime?
Firebombing a grocery store
The Wilmington Ten, led by Benjamin Chavis, were convicted in 1972 of firebombing a grocery store, Mike's Grocery, during 1971 racial unrest; a federal court overturned the convictions in 1980 and Governor Bev Perdue pardoned them in 2012.
Q 18Stage 10 at the Wilmington studios, the third-largest US production stage when opened in 2009, is what size?
37,500 square feet
Stage 10 covers 37,500 square feet with no interior columns, the largest of the lot's ten sound stages when it opened in 2009.
Q 19Which teen drama, set in fictional Capeside, Massachusetts, was filmed in Wilmington from 1998 to 2003?
Dawson's Creek
Dawson's Creek, created by Kevin Williamson, shot its Capeside scenes around Wilmington and Southport; it launched James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams, with Paula Cole's 'I Don't Want to Wait' as its theme.
Q 20Which series about half-brothers on a high-school basketball team was filmed in Wilmington?
One Tree Hill
One Tree Hill, created by Mark Schwahn, ran from 2003 to 2012 on The WB and then The CW; its River Court basketball court was a real spot on the Wilmington riverfront.
The first Azalea Festival was held in April 1948, the brainchild of Dr. W. Houston Moore; Ronald Reagan served as its celebrity emcee in 1959.
Q 24Airlie Gardens, a 67-acre showpiece, was begun in 1886 by whom?
Sarah Green Jones
Sarah Green Jones, wife of wealthy Wilmington rice planter Pembroke Jones, laid out Airlie around her country home; the county bought the 67-acre gardens in 1999, and the Airlie Oak dates from about 1545.
Q 25The Bellamy Mansion, built 1859-61 on Market Street, was used as what by Union forces in 1865?
Military headquarters
Union General Joseph Hawley made the Bellamy Mansion his military headquarters after the city fell in February 1865; Dr. John Bellamy's Greek Revival-Italianate house had been built by enslaved and free Black artisans.
Q 26Thalian Hall, the 1858 theatre, shares its building with what municipal institution?
The city government
Thalian Hall and Wilmington City Hall share one 1858 building designed by John Montague Trimble; the Thalian Association helped fund the theatre wing attached to the city government's offices.
Q 27Which carnivorous plant is native only to a roughly 60-mile radius of Wilmington?
The Venus flytrap
The Venus flytrap grows wild only in wet pine savannas within about 60 miles of Wilmington; North Carolina named it the state carnivorous plant in 2005.
Q 28What did North Carolina do in 2014 to protect its native carnivorous plant?
Made poaching it a felony
In 2014 North Carolina made poaching the plant from the wild a Class H felony; its trap snaps shut only when two trigger hairs are touched within about 20 seconds.
Q 29Hurricane Florence made landfall on September 14, 2018, just south of which town beside Wilmington?
Wrightsville
All roads into Wilmington flooded and the city was cut off; the storm set a state rainfall record of 35.93 inches near Elizabethtown.
Q 30How much rain fell on Wilmington from Hurricane Florence over September 13-16, 2018?
23.02 inches
Wilmington's airport measured 23.02 inches from Florence, which crawled across the coast for days; the storm caused about $24 billion in damage and 54 deaths.