Baton Rouge Trivia
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46 free Baton Rouge trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Baton Rouge is named after a fish-bone-covered pole, has been ruled by France, Britain, Spain, a 74-day republic and the United States, and built America's tallest capitol in 14 months only to have its governor shot inside it. This quiz has 49 free Baton Rouge trivia questions with answers. It covers the city's history from Iberville's 1698 expedition through the 1779 and 1862 battles, the Old State Capitol that Mark Twain hated, the Kingfish, the 1953 bus boycott that Montgomery copied, and the modern city: LSU and Mike the Tiger, Southern University and the Bayou Classic, the ExxonMobil refinery, the port, Raising Cane's first store and the USS Kidd sitting high and dry each autumn. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city, its landmarks and its universities, and each question carries a citation. Use it for a Louisiana pub quiz, a classroom, or to test a Tiger fan who thinks they know their town.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01French settlers expelled from Canada's Acadia in 1755 found a new home around Baton Rouge; what are their descendants called?
Cajuns
Cajuns: the name is simply 'Acadians' as generations of Louisiana tongues wore it down, and it stuck to the French-speaking communities they built in the bayou country.
Q 02The governor's mansion Huey Long built in Baton Rouge in 1930 closely resembles which famous building?
The White House
The White House: the story goes that Long wanted to know his way around the real one when he became president, though some call it simply a fine Georgian mansion.
Q 03Which French explorer led the expedition up the Mississippi that recorded the red stick in 1699?
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville had been sent to find the mouth of the Mississippi from the sea and fortify it, finishing the job La Salle began, and noted the red pole on his way upriver.
Q 04After Union troops took Baton Rouge in 1862, Louisiana's Confederate government ended the war based in which city?
Shreveport
Shreveport took over after a stopover in Opelousas, and the seat of government came home to Baton Rouge only in 1882, twenty years after it left.
Q 05After France gave it up in 1763, Baton Rouge became part of which British colony?
West Florida
West Florida ran along the Gulf Coast from the Mississippi with its capital at Pensacola, but Britain kept Baton Rouge for only 16 years before Spain took the fort.
Q 06Which Spanish commander captured Baton Rouge from the British in September 1779?
Bernardo de Gálvez
Bernardo de Gálvez took the fort even though a hurricane had sunk most of his ships before he set out, and Galveston in Texas still carries his name.
Q 07In 1810, rebels stormed the Spanish fort at Baton Rouge and declared the region what?
An independent republic
An independent republic that lasted just 74 days: American troops marched in that December, and the rebels, some of them reluctantly, hauled down their flag.
Q 08What design did the flag of Baton Rouge's 1810 rebels carry?
A single white star on a blue field
A single white star on a blue field flew over Baton Rouge for only 74 days, but the South brought the design back in 1861 and a hit song renamed it the Bonnie Blue Flag.
Q 09In the 1840s Louisiana's legislature chose Baton Rouge to replace which city as state capital?
New Orleans
New Orleans lost the seat of government after Baton Rouge handed the state a $20,000 plot on its river bluff in 1847 as the site for a new capitol.
Q 10Which author mocked the Old State Capitol as a 'whitewashed castle, with turrets and things'?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain blamed Sir Walter Scott's medieval romances for what he called a little sham castle, and wished dynamite had been allowed to finish what a fire had begun.
Q 11Since its restoration in the 1990s, what has Louisiana's Old State Capitol housed?
The Museum of Political History
The Museum of Political History fills a building with a rough past: a Union Army prison, gutted by fire in 1862, then rebuilt in 1882 with its famous spiral stair and stained-glass dome.
Q 12Louisiana's State Capitol in Baton Rouge holds which record among America's state capitols?
The tallest
The tallest, at 450 feet and 34 storeys: Huey Long insisted on a tower instead of the usual dome and had it finished in little over a year.
Q 13Which future NBA giant played his college basketball in Baton Rouge, for LSU, before going first in the 1992 draft?
Q 21In January 2025 Baton Rouge broke a one-day record that had stood since 1895, for what?
Snowfall
Snowfall: a Gulf Coast blizzard dumped more than half a foot on a city where snow is usually so rare that whole years pass without a measurable flake.
Q 22Which hurricane struck Baton Rouge on September 1, 2008, toppling trees and knocking out power across the city?
Gustav
Gustav turned the tables on a city that had been the refuge three years earlier, when its population roughly doubled almost overnight with people fleeing Katrina.
Q 23Before a fire sent it to Baton Rouge in 1869, LSU stood across the Red River from Alexandria, near which town?
Near Pineville
Shaquille O'Neal
Shaquille O'Neal left LSU a year early for the NBA, then came back for what he had skipped: he finished his degree there in 2000, the same year he was the league's MVP.
Q 14By the official account, which young Baton Rouge doctor shot Huey Long inside the State Capitol in 1935?
Carl Weiss
Carl Weiss was cut down on the spot by Long's bodyguards, and Long died two days later; he lies buried in front of the building beneath his own statue.
Q 15What was Huey Long's famous nickname?
The Kingfish
The Kingfish was a name he gave himself, borrowed from a scheming lodge boss on the radio comedy Amos 'n' Andy; he called himself 'a small fish here in Washington' but the Kingfish back home.
Q 16Which Kris Kristofferson song opens with the words 'Busted flat in Baton Rouge'?
Me and Bobby McGee
Me and Bobby McGee took the city's name to the top of the American charts in 1971, sung by Janis Joplin on a record released a few months after her death.
Q 17For more than fifty years, what did LSU's Tiger Stadium contain beneath its stands besides football facilities?
Student dormitories
Student dormitories: in 1931 the athletic director took $250,000 meant for new dorms and built the rooms into the stadium, which let him add seats on top; about 1,500 students lived there.
Q 18Which compass direction is in the name of the parish where Baton Rouge sits?
East
East, because a second parish, West Baton Rouge, faces the city from the opposite bank of the Mississippi, with its own seat at Port Allen.
Q 19Which director who went to high school in Baton Rouge set and shot his 1989 debut feature there?
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh wrote 'sex, lies, and videotape' in eight days on a cross-country trip, and it won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes at just 26.
Q 20Baton Rouge is the third-southernmost continental US capital, after Tallahassee and which?
Austin
Austin lies about a fifth of a degree further south, while Tallahassee, up in the Florida Panhandle, sits level with Baton Rouge to within a mile or two; island Honolulu does not count.
Near Pineville the school opened in 1860 as a seminary run on military lines, which is why LSU is nicknamed the Ole War Skule; a fire in 1869 drove it to Baton Rouge.
Q 24Which future Union general was LSU's first superintendent?
William Tecumseh Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman resigned when Louisiana left the Union in January 1861 and went north, and within four years he was marching an army through Georgia.
Q 25What is the nickname of LSU's Tiger Stadium?
Death Valley
Death Valley holds more than 100,000, and on 8 October 1988 the roar that greeted a late winning touchdown against Auburn registered on a seismograph across campus.
Q 26The two grassy 20-foot mounds beside LSU's Field House were raised by whom?
Ancient hunter-gatherers
Ancient hunter-gatherers built them thousands of years ago, which puts them among the oldest structures made by people in the Americas; since 2010 LSU has fenced them off on game days to keep tailgaters away.
Q 27LSU's live tiger mascot is named Mike in honour of whom?
An athletic trainer
An athletic trainer, Mike Chambers, led the 1936 drive in which students gave 25 cents each to buy a year-old tiger from the Little Rock Zoo; the animal arrived as Sheik and was renamed for him.
Q 28Since Mike VI died in 2016, what has changed for LSU's live tiger on game days?
He no longer leaves his habitat
He no longer leaves his habitat: for decades Mike was wheeled around the field in a cage topped with cheerleaders, until LSU ended the ritual over concerns about how a live mascot should be treated.
Q 29Whose country hit 'Callin' Baton Rouge' is played before every LSU home football game?
Garth Brooks
Garth Brooks sang it live in Tiger Stadium in April 2022, and more than 100,000 fans jumping along set the campus seismograph twitching, just as a famous touchdown had in 1988.
Q 30Southern University, in the Scotlandville area of Baton Rouge, is the flagship of the nation's only what?
Historically black college system
A historically black college system, and its flagship is a transplant: the school began downriver and moved in 1914 to Scott's Bluff, above the Mississippi at Scotlandville.