Columbus, Ohio Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
49 free Columbus, Ohio trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free Columbus, Ohio trivia questions with answers. This Columbus Ohio trivia quiz is for people who live in the 614 and for anyone who has ever wondered why the biggest city in Ohio is the one nobody outside Ohio can place on a map. It covers the founding in 1812 on a wooded ridge opposite Franklinton, the Statehouse that famously lacks a dome, the flood that remade the riverfront, the wooden arches that gave the city a nickname and the annexation strategy that made it Ohio's largest city. Sport gets its share: Ohio Stadium and Script Ohio, the Blue Jackets' first playoff series win, the Crew as a charter MLS club, the Clippers and Jack Nicklaus's tournament in Dublin. So do the businesses that started here (Wendy's, White Castle's home base, Nationwide, Battelle and the photocopier, Victoria's Secret under Les Wexner) and the places locals send visitors: German Village, the Short North, North Market, COSI, Franklin Park Conservatory, Topiary Park and the zoo Jack Hanna made famous. The early questions are easy for any resident; the later ones will test a Columbus history buff. Every answer was checked against a reference page and shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Columbus was founded in 1812 at the confluence of the Olentangy River and which other river?
Scioto
Scioto and Olentangy meet at what was dense forest in 1812, used only as a hunting ground: the legislature picked the spot for a brand-new capital because it lay near the centre of the state.
Q 02Which Olympic gymnastics champion was born in Columbus in 1997 and raised in Texas by her grandparents?
Simone Biles
Simone Biles left Columbus as a small child when her grandparents adopted her and her sister; in Spring, Texas, a day-care field trip to a gym at six started her career.
Q 03Which city was Ohio's first state capital and served again as capital until the government moved to Columbus in 1816?
Chillicothe
Chillicothe hosted the government twice, with a two-year spell in Zanesville in between, before lawmakers tired of the back-and-forth and ordered a new capital built near the centre of the state.
Q 04At the 2020 census, Columbus was the third most populous US state capital, behind Phoenix and which other city?
Austin
Austin had about 962,000 residents to Columbus's 906,000. The Ohio capital owes its rank to decades of annexing its suburbs, which had to join the city to get its water and sewer lines.
Q 05Which Columbus mayor of the 1940s went on to serve four terms as governor of Ohio?
Jim Rhodes
Jim Rhodes was elected mayor at 34 and governor in 1962. His darkest day in that office came on 4 May 1970, when Ohio National Guard troops shot four students dead at Kent State.
Q 06Columbus earned the nickname 'The Arch City' from what?
Wooden arches spanning High Street
Wooden arches spanning High Street first went up in 1888 to light the way for a huge reunion of Union army veterans, then stayed on to carry the power lines for the city's streetcars.
Q 07The Great Flood of 1913, which killed more than 90 people in Columbus, devastated which neighbourhood?
Franklinton
Franklinton, on low ground west of the river, was engulfed when the levees gave way; a seven-mile floodwall finished in 2004 finally lifted the building limits that had held the neighbourhood back.
Q 08Which Columbus camp held thousands of Confederate prisoners and still has one of the largest Confederate cemeteries in the North?
Camp Chase
Camp Chase was named for Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's Treasury secretary; three decades on, a wounded Union veteran, William Knauss, led the drive to mark the graves of the 2,000-odd Confederates buried there.
Q 09The Ohio Statehouse is famous for lacking what feature that visitors expect on a capitol building?
A dome
A dome was in every early design, but the builders capped the cupola with a low conical roof instead. Work once stopped for eight years, and the buried foundations were grazed as pasture.
Q 10Which workforce built the foundation and ground floor of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus?
Prison inmates
Prison inmates from the Ohio Penitentiary did the early work, until skilled tradesmen objected that convicts were taking well-paid jobs and the hiring was changed for the rest of the build.
Q 11Ohio State University was founded in 1870 under what original name?
Agricultural and Mechanical College
Agricultural and Mechanical College was the name on its land-grant charter; once trustees chose to teach far more than farming, the legislature renamed it The Ohio State University in 1878.
Q 12Which 1965 hit by the McCoys, a staple of the Ohio State marching band, is Ohio's official rock song?
Hang On Sloopy
Hang On Sloopy fell flat when the band first tried it, on a rainy day in 1965, after an arranger had begged the director to play it; within weeks fans were chanting 'We want Sloopy!'
Q 13As of 2025, which Ohio State running back is the only player to have won the Heisman Trophy twice?
Q 21Before founding Wendy's in Columbus, Dave Thomas revived four failing local restaurants of which chain?
KFC
KFC it was: against Colonel Sanders's own advice, Thomas took on the four Columbus outlets, trimmed the menu and put up a sign like a revolving chicken bucket, then sold his stake in 1968, the year before Wendy's opened.
Q 22Which bestselling children's horror writer was born in Columbus and edited Ohio State's humour magazine as a student?
R. L. Stine
R. L. Stine began with jokes, not scares: he typed joke books on an attic typewriter from the age of nine, ran Ohio State's Sundial for three years and wrote as Jovial Bob Stine long before Goosebumps.
Q 23Which burger chain, founded in Wichita in 1921, has kept its headquarters in Columbus since the 1930s?
White Castle
Archie Griffin
Archie Griffin, a Columbus native, fumbled his only carry in his first game as a freshman, then ran for a school-record 239 yards in his second.
Q 14In the Ohio State marching band's Script Ohio, which instrument's player traditionally dots the 'i'?
Sousaphone
Sousaphone players were not the first choice: the opening dot, in 1936, went to a cornet player, and the director switched to the band's biggest horn the following year to make it stand out.
Q 15The Columbus Blue Jackets' name and logos are inspired by Ohio's contribution to what?
The Civil War
The Civil War link honours a state that sent a larger share of its people into the Union army than any other; the club chose the name over 'Justice' after a contest that drew 14,000 entries.
Q 16Which sports pioneer owned the Columbus Crew and paid for its 1999 stadium, the first built for an MLS team?
Lamar Hunt
Lamar Hunt paid for it privately, setting off a wave of soccer-only grounds across the league; decades earlier he had given American football the name 'Super Bowl'.
Q 17Where did the Columbus Crew play home games from 1996 to 1998, before their own ground opened?
Ohio State's Horseshoe
Ohio State's Horseshoe was a poor fit: most of its 90,000 seats were closed off, the pitch was cramped and night games needed rented lights, so the club built a ground of its own.
Q 18As of 2025, the Columbus Clippers are the Triple-A affiliate of which MLB team?
Cleveland Guardians
Cleveland Guardians prospects have come through Columbus only since 2009; from 1979 to 2006 the Clippers were the top farm club of the New York Yankees, winning seven league titles.
Q 19Jack Nicklaus's Memorial Tournament is held at Muirfield Village in which Columbus suburb?
Dublin
Dublin got the course when Nicklaus, born in Columbus, set out to build a tournament of his own; he named it after Muirfield in Scotland, where he won his first Open in 1966.
Q 20Which film star hosts the annual Columbus sports festival that grew out of a bodybuilding contest?
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Schwarzenegger first triumphed in Columbus as a bodybuilder, winning the 1970 Mr. World title there; he came back in 1989 to launch the contest that grew into the festival.
White Castle, often called the first fast-food chain, sold its burgers for five cents; co-founder Billy Ingram bought out his partner in 1933 and moved the head office to Columbus the next year.
Q 24Nationwide, one of the city's Fortune 500 companies, began in 1926 as an insurer for which group?
Farmers
Farm Bureau Mutual was set up because farmers were paying the same car-insurance rates as city drivers despite having fewer accidents; it took the name Nationwide in 1955 as it grew beyond farm country.
Q 25Battelle Memorial Institute's development of Chester Carlson's dry-copying idea led to which company?
Xerox
Xerox was the long shot that paid off: more than twenty companies turned Carlson down before Battelle took on his process in 1944 and a small firm called Haloid bought the rights.
Q 26Which Columbus retail magnate bought the fledgling Victoria's Secret chain in 1982?
Les Wexner
Les Wexner had opened his first shop, The Limited, in 1963 with $5,000 borrowed from his aunt; he took Victoria's Secret into the malls and to some 350 stores within a decade.
Q 27Columbus has long been used by national restaurant and retail chains as what?
A test market
A test market: its mix of incomes, backgrounds and city, suburb and countryside makes Columbus a cross-section of the nation, so a new burger has to win over diners there before it goes national.
Q 28Which Columbus museum moved in 1999 into a riverfront building made from the old Central High School?
COSI
COSI, short for Center of Science and Industry, soon found its new home costly: after voters turned down a funding levy in 2004, it closed the south wing and the planetarium to cut costs.
Q 29Columbus's Topiary Park recreates which famous painting in clipped shrubbery?
Seurat's La Grande Jatte
Seurat's La Grande Jatte grows here as what its sculptor, James T. Mason, called 'a landscape of a painting of a landscape': clipped shrub figures stand around a pond that plays the Seine.
Q 30Which Columbus-born New Yorker cartoonist and humorist has a museum in his family home there?
James Thurber
James Thurber lived in the house as an Ohio State student, and an eerie night there in 1915 gave him his story 'The Night the Ghost Got In'; the museum now offers ghost investigations.