50 free Columbia SC trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Columbia was laid out as a capital city on purpose in 1786, five years before Washington, and it has been collecting good trivia ever since: the secession convention that met in a downtown church, the night in 1865 when much of the city burned, the Army post that trains more new soldiers than any other, a zoo that outdraws everything else in the state, a stadium famous for a techno song, and a college band that met in a dorm shower and went 22-times platinum with its first album. This quiz covers the city's history, geography, landmarks, sports, colleges and famous names. Easy questions ask which rivers meet here and what the Gamecocks' mascot is called; the harder ones want the surveyor who drew the grid, the year the canal was dug, the record temperature, the founders of the two historically Black colleges and which famous 1942 mission the bomber crews at the airport volunteered for. It works for a Soda City trivia night, a USC family weekend or anyone settling an argument about whether Columbia is really Famously Hot. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the city, its institutions and its landmarks, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two rivers meet at Columbia to form the Congaree?
The Broad and the Saluda
The city grew up at the fall line, the head of navigation on the Santee river system, roughly halfway between the Atlantic and the Blue Ridge.
Q 02In what year did South Carolina's General Assembly approve creating Columbia as a new capital?
1786
Legislators wanted a capital more central than Charleston, and the assembly first met in the new city in 1790.
Q 03Which surveyor laid out Columbia's two-mile-square grid, making it one of the first US planned cities?
John Guignard
His plan came five years before L'Enfant's Washington, with 150-foot-wide Assembly and Senate streets and 400 blocks.
Q 04Columbia's nickname "Soda City" comes from what?
The shortening of its name to "Cola"
The name Columbia itself is a poetic personification of the United States.
Q 05Which South Carolina city is more populous than Columbia, making Columbia the state's second-largest?
Charleston
The city had 136,632 residents at the 2020 census, but its six-county metro area is home to nearly 900,000.
Q 06Columbia is the seat of which county?
Richland
Parts of the city spill into Lexington and Kershaw counties, and Richland Library was named National Library of the Year in 2001.
Q 07Which Spanish explorer's expedition passed through the site of Columbia, SC in May 1540?
Hernando de Soto
The area was then part of the Cofitachequi chiefdom of the Mississippian culture.
Q 08The South's earliest secession convention met in Columbia on December 17, 1860, in which building?
First Baptist Church
A smallpox outbreak sent the delegates on to the coast, where South Carolina became the first state to secede.
Q 09Which Union general's army captured Columbia on February 17, 1865, the night much of the city burned?
William T. Sherman
Roughly a third of the buildings were destroyed; modern historians say no single cause was to blame, though burning cotton bales in the streets did not help.
Q 10Roughly what fraction of Columbia's buildings were destroyed in the fires of February 1865?
A third
Retreating Confederates had ordered the city's huge cotton stocks dragged into the streets to be burned so they would not fall to the enemy.
Q 11What was the city's minor-league baseball team called before it moved from Georgia in 2015?
The Sand Gnats
They arrived from Savannah, where they had been the Sand Gnats, and threw a combined no-hitter in only their third game in 2016.
Q 12Which Major League club became the Columbia Fireflies' affiliate in the 2021 shake-up?
Kansas City Royals
The Mets dropped the affiliation in the 2021 minor-league shake-up after five seasons.
Q 13Fort Jackson in Columbia trains roughly what share of all soldiers entering the US Army each year?
Half
About 35,000 recruits pass through basic training there annually, and the post covers around two-thirds of Columbia's land area.
Q 21Which coach led South Carolina women's basketball to a perfect 2024 national title?
Dawn Staley
A Philadelphia point guard and Virginia star, she took over the Gamecocks in 2008 and won the program's first title in 2017.
Q 22Which band formed at the University of South Carolina in 1986 after one member heard another singing in the showers?
Hootie & the Blowfish
Darius Rucker and Mark Bryan first played covers as the Wolf Brothers; Cracked Rear View went 22-times platinum.
Q 23The band's owl-and-fish name came from what?
Nicknames of two college friends
Q 14The Army post on the city's east side was first established under what name in 1917?
Camp Jackson
It closed after the First World War, was reactivated in 1940 and is named for President Andrew Jackson.
Q 15Under what name was the state's flagship university founded in Columbia in 1801?
South Carolina College
Governor John Drayton pushed it through to promote harmony between the Lowcountry and the Backcountry; classes began in 1805 with nine students.
Q 16What is the name of the University of South Carolina's costumed rooster mascot?
Cocky
He debuted at Homecoming in 1980 as the son of Big Spur, a gangly earlier mascot deemed too unwieldy.
Q 17In which athletic conference do the South Carolina Gamecocks compete?
The SEC
Football, baseball and both basketball programs draw some of the biggest crowds in the state.
Q 18Under what name did the Gamecocks' football ground, built with WPA money, open in 1934?
Columbia Municipal Stadium
It replaced the wooden Melton Field and was renamed for Martha Williams Brice after her estate funded the 1971-72 expansion.
Q 19Roughly how many spectators did Williams-Brice Stadium hold as of the 2025 season?
More than 77,000
Its ends were filled in during the 1940s and 1950s to make a bowl, and it ranks among the loudest venues in college football.
Q 20Which venue, opened in 2002 as the Carolina Center, is South Carolina's largest indoor arena?
Colonial Life
It seats 18,000 and opened with a women's basketball game against Clemson that charged a dollar a ticket.
One friend's big round glasses made him look like an owl; the other's puffy cheeks earned him the fish name.
Q 24Roughly how many visitors a year does Riverbanks Zoo & Garden, South Carolina's largest gated attraction, draw?
More than a million
Not bad for a metro area of under 900,000 people; it opened in the 1970s and has won the Southeast's top-attraction award four times.
Q 25In what year did Riverbanks Zoo open?
1974
A special-purpose district shared by the city and two counties runs it, and part of the grounds lie in West Columbia.
Q 26Congaree National Park, southeast of the city, protects the largest remaining tract of what?
Old-growth bottomland hardwood forest
It has some of the tallest trees in the eastern US, including a 169-foot loblolly pine, and later lost the word Swamp from its name.
Q 27Congaree was upgraded from a national monument to a national park in which year?
2003
Senators Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings had backed the original 1976 protection after a grassroots campaign against renewed logging.
Q 28Roughly how many miles of shoreline does Lake Murray, northwest of Columbia, have?
About 650
The 50,000-acre lake was impounded in the late 1920s for hydroelectric power and became a boating and fishing magnet.
Q 29Which state agencies and offices are housed in and around the South Carolina State House?
The General Assembly plus the governor and Supreme Court
The current building was redesigned by John Niernsee in 1855 after the first architect was fired for fraud, and it was still unfinished when Union shells hit it.
Q 30What happened at the State House grounds in 2015 after the mass shooting at a Black church in Charleston?
The Confederate battle flag was permanently removed
The flag had been moved from the dome to the grounds in 2000; the same year brought historic flooding that displaced a Gamecocks home game.