Atlanta
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50 free Atlanta trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Atlanta started as a railroad milepost that its own chief engineer said would support one tavern and nothing else. It was burned by Sherman, rebuilt as the capital of the New South, became the organising centre of the civil rights movement, hosted the 1996 Olympics and now runs the world's busiest airport under the densest tree canopy of any major American city. These 50 questions move through that story: Terminus and the Western and Atlantic Railroad, John Bell Hood's retreat, Milledgeville, Henry Grady, the 1895 exposition, the 1939 Gone with the Wind premiere and the actress barred from it, Maynard Jackson and Shirley Franklin. Then the modern city: Delta, Ted Turner, Tyler Perry Studios, the Eastern Continental Divide, Buckhead, the Georgia Aquarium, the Varsity, Buford Highway, Outkast and the Sex Pistols' first US show. Sports questions cover the Braves, Falcons, Atlanta United, the departed Thrashers and the Peachtree Road Race. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something either way. Play it solo or print it for a Georgia trivia night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Atlanta is the county seat of which county?
Fulton
Fulton County was carved from DeKalb's western half in 1853, so Atlanta, born a DeKalb town, became the new county's seat; part of the city still sits in DeKalb.
Q 02Atlanta's name is said to come from which railroad?
Western and Atlantic
Western and Atlantic: another line's chief engineer, J. Edgar Thomson, coined 'Atlanta' for his depot in 1845, supposedly as a feminine 'Atlantic', and the town dropped the name Marthasville.
Q 03What was the settlement that grew into Atlanta first called?
Terminus
Terminus simply marked where a new state railroad was to stop; in 1843 the town became Marthasville, for the daughter of ex-governor Wilson Lumpkin, a champion of the line.
Q 04The state railroad that gave birth to Atlanta in 1837 was built north to which Tennessee city?
Chattanooga
Chattanooga was the goal; in 1862 Union raiders stole the locomotive General on that same line and raced north wrecking track, a failed mission remembered as the Great Locomotive Chase.
Q 05Which Union general burned Atlanta before the March to the Sea?
William T. Sherman
William T. Sherman ordered the remaining residents out, then had rail depots, machine shops and factories demolished so the city could never again supply Confederate armies.
Q 06Atlanta's fall helped which president win re-election?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln wrote in late August that it was 'exceedingly probable' he would lose; Atlanta's capture days later turned the race, and he beat George McClellan easily.
Q 07Which Confederate general ordered the retreat from Atlanta as Union forces closed in?
John Bell Hood
John Bell Hood, his last rail supply line cut, had his retreating troops blow up their own ammunition train, a blast that levelled the city's big rolling mill.
Q 08Georgia's state capital moved to Atlanta in 1868 from which city?
Milledgeville
Milledgeville lost out after Atlanta, with better rail links, offered the state free government buildings for ten years and land for a new capitol.
Q 09Which newspaper editor promoted Atlanta as the city of the 'New South'?
Henry W. Grady
Henry W. Grady took the pitch north in an 1886 New York speech, declaring slavery and secession dead and inviting Northern money into Southern industry.
Q 10Which educator gave his 'Atlanta Compromise' speech at the city's 1895 cotton exposition?
Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington told the crowd the races could be 'as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand'; W. E. B. Du Bois later attacked that stance as adjustment and submission.
Q 11Atlanta surpassed which city as Georgia's largest in the 1880 census?
Savannah
Savannah had a century's head start as Georgia's colonial port, yet the rail town founded in 1837 outgrew it within 43 years, 37,409 residents to 30,709.
Q 12Leo Frank was lynched in 1915 in which town near Atlanta?
Marietta
Marietta was the hometown of Mary Phagan, the girl Frank was convicted of killing; after the governor commuted his sentence, armed men took him from prison and hanged him there.
Q 13The Great Atlanta Fire of 1917 began in which neighbourhood?
Old Fourth Ward
Old Fourth Ward burned as wind drove the flames north to Ponce de Leon Avenue; more than 10,000 people lost their homes, yet only one person died.
Q 21Which city lost the final vote for the 1996 Olympics to Atlanta?
Athens
Athens staged the first modern Games in 1896 and wanted the 100th-anniversary edition back; Atlanta won the 1990 vote instead, and Athens had to wait until 2004.
Q 22A pipe bomb exploded at which downtown site during Atlanta's 1996 Olympics?
Centennial Olympic Park
Guard Richard Jewell spotted the knapsack in Centennial Olympic Park and cleared the crowd, then was wrongly treated as the suspect. Eric Rudolph later pleaded guilty.
Q 23Atlanta's airport began on a racetrack owned by the tycoon behind which company?
Coca-Cola
Q 14Which 1939 film premiered at Atlanta's Loew's Grand Theatre?
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind arrived after three days of parades and balls, with a holiday declared for the occasion and huge crowds lining the streets to watch the stars drive in.
Q 15Which Oscar winner was barred from the 1939 Loew's Grand premiere by segregation laws?
Hattie McDaniel
Hattie McDaniel talked co-star Clark Gable out of boycotting the premiere over her exclusion; at the next Oscars she was seated at a small table against the far wall.
Q 16Which Atlanta author's house museum marks where she wrote her best-selling novel?
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell wrote most of the book in a small ground-floor flat she called 'the Dump', typing at an old sewing table while laid up with a broken ankle.
Q 17Who was elected Atlanta's first Black mayor in 1973?
Maynard Jackson
Maynard Jackson, just 35, made sure minority-owned firms shared in city contracts, above all on the huge new airport terminal he finished 'ahead of schedule and under budget'.
Q 18Who in 2001 became the first woman elected mayor of Atlanta?
Shirley Franklin
Shirley Franklin took office in 2002, and in 2006 brokered a last-minute deal that pulled Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers from auction and kept them in Atlanta, at Morehouse College.
Q 19Who became mayor of Atlanta in January 2022?
Andre Dickens
Andre Dickens edged former mayor Kasim Reed for second place in the first round, then beat council president Felicia Moore, who had led it, by a wide margin in the runoff.
Q 20Which mayor promoted Atlanta as 'the city too busy to hate' through the 1950s?
William Hartsfield
William Hartsfield repeated the line through the civil rights struggles of the 1950s, and in 1957 he won his last term by beating the ardent segregationist Lester Maddox, a future governor.
Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler owned the abandoned speedway. The city leased its 287 acres in 1925 and named the new airfield Candler Field.
Q 24Which airline is headquartered in Atlanta and runs its biggest hub at the city's airport?
Delta
Delta began as a crop-dusting outfit in Macon, Georgia, battling the boll weevil, moved to Monroe, Louisiana, in 1925, and brought its headquarters to Atlanta in 1941.
Q 25Which media mogul founded CNN, TNT and TBS in Atlanta?
Ted Turner
Ted Turner beamed a small Atlanta UHF station nationwide by satellite in 1976 as the Superstation, then launched CNN as a 24-hour news channel in 1980.
Q 26Which Silicon Valley-style nickname has been given to Atlanta's tech scene?
Silicon Peach
Silicon Peach grafts Silicon Valley onto Georgia's Peach State nickname, which the state earned as its orchards boomed in the decades after the Civil War.
Q 27Which film studio occupies Atlanta's former Fort McPherson army base?
Tyler Perry Studios
Tyler Perry bought 330 acres of the closed fort in 2015, and his Tyler Perry Studios now keeps a replica White House among its standing sets.
Q 28Atlanta has the highest elevation of any major city east of which river?
Mississippi
At about 1,050 feet in the Appalachian foothills, Atlanta sits higher than any other big city east of the Mississippi, which takes some of the edge off its summers.
Q 29Atlanta straddles which watershed boundary?
Eastern Continental Divide
The Eastern Continental Divide runs through downtown, and the early railroads were laid along its ridge. Rain on one side drains to the Atlantic, on the other to the Gulf of Mexico.
Q 30Which river forms part of Atlanta's northwestern city limit?
Chattahoochee
The Chattahoochee is metro Atlanta's main drinking-water supply, which is why Georgia, Alabama and Florida have spent decades in court over its flow.