Asheville Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Asheville trivia questions with answers. Asheville is a mountain city of about 95,000 that punches far above its size: it has the largest private house in America, one of the best-preserved Art Deco downtowns in the country, a synthesizer factory, a drum circle, and more breweries than most cities ten times as big. This quiz covers all of it, from the Cherokee name for the river confluence and the governor the town was named after to the Vanderbilts, E. W. Grove and his tonic fortune, Thomas Wolfe's thinly disguised neighbours, and Zelda Fitzgerald's last months at Highland Hospital. Easy questions cover the rivers, the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Hunger Games; harder ones get into Black Mountain College, the Grove Arcade's federal tenant, why the downtown escaped the wrecking ball, and which Michigan city Asheville tied for the title of Beer City USA. Every answer has been checked against a published source, Wikipedia or an official page, and the citation sits under each question. Good for anyone who has driven the Parkway, toured Biltmore at Christmas, or is planning a first trip to the Land of the Sky.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Asheville was renamed in 1797 in honor of which North Carolina governor?
Samuel Ashe
Samuel Ashe was 70 when the legislature elected him governor in 1795, and he served the constitutional maximum of three one-year terms.
Q 02What was Asheville's population at the 2020 census?
94,589
94,589 at the 2020 census made Asheville the most populous city in Western North Carolina and the state's 11th-largest.
Q 03Asheville sits at the confluence of the Swannanoa River and which larger river?
French Broad
The French Broad, often called one of the world's oldest rivers, meets the Swannanoa at Asheville and flows north-west into Tennessee.
Q 04Roughly how high above sea level is Asheville?
2,130 ft
2,130 ft: Asheville's elevation of roughly 2,134 feet keeps its summers cooler than the lowland Southeast, with only a handful of 90-degree days in a typical year.
Q 05Asheville's nickname 'Land of the Sky' was popularised by an 1876 novel written under which pen name?
Christian Reid
Christian Reid was the pen name of Frances Tiernan of Salisbury, NC; her 1876 travel-romance 'The Land of the Sky' gave the mountains, then the city, the nickname.
Q 06The Cherokee name for the site of Asheville, Untokiasdiyi, is usually translated how?
Where they race
'Where they race' is the usual rendering of Untokiasdiyi, the Cherokee name for the open ground at the meeting of the two rivers where Asheville later grew.
Q 07Which word for empty talk comes from Felix Walker's rambling 1820 speech for his home county?
bunkum
Bunkum: Walker said he was 'speaking for Buncombe', and the county's name became a word for nonsense, later shortened to 'bunk' and giving us 'debunk'.
Q 08The April 1865 'Battle of Asheville' was fought on ground now occupied by what?
UNCA campus
UNCA campus: the skirmish of 6 April 1865 took place along what is now the University of North Carolina at Asheville grounds, and the Union column withdrew toward Tennessee.
Q 09After the 1930 crash, Asheville spent about how many years paying off its debts rather than defaulting?
50
50: Asheville chose to repay rather than default and retired the last of its Depression-era debt in 1976, which left downtown's 1920s buildings largely untouched.
Q 10Which architect designed Asheville's 1928 Art Deco City Hall, Asheville High School and the S&W Cafeteria?
Douglas Ellington
Douglas Ellington's City Hall was meant to be twinned with the county courthouse, but the county chose a taller Neoclassical tower by another firm and the connecting wing was never built.
Q 11The 1924 Jackson Building, western North Carolina's first skyscraper, rose on the lot of Thomas Wolfe's father's what?
Tombstone business
Tombstone business: W.O. Wolfe's monument shop stood on the tiny Pack Square lot, and the 13-storey neo-Gothic Jackson Building that replaced it was the region's first skyscraper.
Q 12Biltmore House was designed in the Châteauesque style by which New York architect?
Richard Morris Hunt
Richard Morris Hunt, the first American trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, toured Loire chateaux such as Blois and Chambord with Vanderbilt in 1889 before designing the house.
Q 13Which landscape architect, famous for Central Park, laid out the Biltmore grounds?
Frederick Law Olmsted
Q 21E. W. Grove made his fortune with a 'Tasteless Chill Tonic' sold as a remedy for which disease?
Malaria
Malaria: Grove's tonic masked the bitter taste of quinine, the standard malaria remedy, in a sweet syrup, and its sales paid for the Grove Park Inn he opened in 1913.
Q 22Which untrained son-in-law of Grove sketched the design for the Grove Park Inn?
Fred Seely
Fred Seely, Grove's son-in-law and no trained architect, sketched the granite hotel, which about 400 workers finished in under a year before its July 1913 opening.
Q 23Which novelist lived at the Grove Park Inn in the mid-1930s while his wife got psychiatric care nearby?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Frederick Law Olmsted, unimpressed by the worn-out land, proposed a park around the house, farms along the river and a managed timber forest across the rest.
Q 14Biltmore House, the largest privately owned home in the United States, contains how many rooms?
250
250 rooms, including 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms and 65 fireplaces, plus an electric Otis elevator and a basement bowling alley.
Q 15In what year did Vanderbilt open Biltmore House to family and friends on Christmas Eve?
1895
1895: after six years of construction that began in 1889 with about 1,000 workers and a private rail spur, Vanderbilt welcomed family and friends on Christmas Eve 1895.
Q 16'Biltmore' pairs an old word for rolling land with De Bilt, a town in which country?
Netherlands
Netherlands: the Vanderbilts' ancestor came to New Amsterdam from the Dutch village of De Bilt in the 17th century.
Q 17During WWII, which Washington institution shipped 62 paintings and 17 sculptures to Biltmore for safekeeping?
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art stored 62 paintings and 17 sculptures, including Gilbert Stuart's George Washington and works by Rembrandt and Raphael, in Biltmore's unfinished Music Room from 1942 to 1944.
Q 18The first US forestry school opened on the Biltmore grounds in 1898 under which forester?
Carl A. Schenck
Carl A. Schenck, the German forester who had replaced Gifford Pinchot as Biltmore's forest manager, founded the Biltmore Forest School on the estate in 1898.
Q 19Which Best Picture winner is among the films that shot scenes at Biltmore Estate?
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump shot scenes on the estate's tree-lined approach road; Biltmore has also doubled for locations in Being There, Richie Rich, Patch Adams and Hannibal.
Q 20Biltmore Village, built as a company town for estate workers, was previously a settlement called what?
Best
Best, a small railroad-stop village, was bought up by Vanderbilt in the 1890s and rebuilt as an English-style estate village around All Souls church.
F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed in rooms 441 and 443 in 1935-36, drinking heavily, while Zelda was a patient across town.
Q 24Which former president resigned as Chief Justice while staying at the Grove Park Inn in 1930?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft, the only person to head both the executive branch and the Supreme Court, sent his resignation from the inn on 3 February 1930 and died five weeks later.
Q 25Which country's government operated in exile from a cottage at the Grove Park Inn during World War II?
Philippines
Philippines: President Manuel Quezon's exiled Commonwealth government worked from a cottage on the grounds in 1944, after the inn had interned Axis diplomats early in the war.
Q 26The Grove Park Inn first staged the National Gingerbread House Competition in which year?
1992
1992: the competition began that year as a small local contest and grew into a national event drawing entries from across the country.
Q 27Which federal agency occupied Asheville's Grove Arcade until 1995?
National Climatic Data Center
The National Climatic Data Center, keeper of the nation's weather records, filled the 1929 building until 1995; the Arcade reopened as a public market in 2002.
Q 28In Thomas Wolfe's 1929 novel Look Homeward, Angel, Asheville appears under what fictional name?
Altamont
Altamont: Wolfe's portrait of the town featured more than 200 thinly disguised locals, and the uproar kept him away from Asheville for eight years, until 1937.
Q 29The boarding house Wolfe's mother ran, now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, was named after which state?
Kentucky
Kentucky: 'Old Kentucky Home' was the boarding house Julia Wolfe ran from 1906; an arsonist set it ablaze during the 1998 Bele Chere festival and was never caught.
Q 30Who wrote 'The Gift of the Magi' and is buried near Thomas Wolfe in Asheville's Riverside Cemetery?
O. Henry
O. Henry, the pen name of William Sydney Porter, married an Asheville woman and was buried in Riverside Cemetery after his death in New York in 1910.