Des Moines Trivia
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60 free Des Moines trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Des Moines started as a frontier fort where two rivers meet, became Iowa's capital in 1857 and grew into the insurance-heavy, caucus-hosting city that presidential candidates camp out in every four years. This Des Moines trivia quiz covers all of it: how the city got its French name, the 1993 flood that knocked out the water works, the gold-leafed Capitol dome, the Iowa State Fair and its butter cow, Terrace Hill, the skywalks, the Drake Relays, the Iowa Cubs at Principal Park, and the locals who made it big, from Cloris Leachman and Bill Bryson to Slipknot. The 60 questions run from easy ones any Iowan will get to genuinely obscure history for people who grew up reading the Register, so it works for a bar quiz, a classroom or a family night in the 515. Every answer has been checked against a documented source rather than copied from another trivia list, so you can trust the answer key.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The French name Des Moines is usually translated as 'River of the' what?
Monks
Monks: 'des moines' is French for 'of the monks', but the name probably began as Moingona, a people living along the river whose name French fur trappers bent into a word they knew.
Q 02Which river merges with the Des Moines River at the spot where the city was founded?
Raccoon
Raccoon: the Army officers who built the fort at the two rivers' meeting point in 1843 proposed calling it Fort Raccoon, but the War Department turned the name down in favour of Fort Des Moines.
Q 03In the 1969 Tinker case, the Supreme Court backed Des Moines students suspended for wearing what to school?
Black armbands
Black armbands: Mary Beth Tinker, 13, her brother John and a friend wore them in December 1965 over the Vietnam War, and the Court ruled 7-2 that students do not shed free-speech rights at the schoolhouse gate.
Q 04Which town was the state capital before the seat of government moved to Des Moines in 1857?
Iowa City
Iowa City: when the government left for Des Moines in 1857, the stone capitol it vacated was handed to the young University of Iowa as its first permanent building, and it is now a museum on the campus.
Q 05Fort Des Moines was built in 1843 on land still held by which peoples, soon removed to Kansas?
Sauk and Meskwaki
Sauk and Meskwaki: the fort closed in 1846 once both had been sent to Kansas, but Meskwaki families came back and in 1857 bought 80 acres in Tama County, the start of the Meskwaki Settlement.
Q 06Roughly how many people lived within Des Moines' city limits at the 2020 census?
About 214,000
About 214,000: the 2020 count of 214,133 was the first census to top the city's 1960 peak of 208,982, ending six decades in which Des Moines sat below its mid-century size.
Q 07Fort Des Moines was designated the seat of which county in 1846?
Polk
Polk: the new county seat was little more than the log buildings the Army had abandoned that same year, which settlers moved straight into as the soldiers left.
Q 08Which Des Moines utility plant was swamped in the 1993 flood, cutting service to a quarter of a million people?
The Water Works
The Water Works: the river came over its levee on July 11, 1993, and tap water was not safe to drink again for nearly three weeks, so the utility raised the levee and later built backup treatment plants.
Q 09Which reservoir controls the Des Moines River upstream of the city?
Saylorville
Saylorville Lake, a Corps of Engineers reservoir just north of the city, holds back the Des Moines River; its emergency spillway overflowed anyway in 1993 and 2008.
Q 10Which rust-brown Des Moines tower did 801 Grand overtake as Iowa's tallest building?
Ruan Center
Ruan Center: trucking magnate John Ruan wrapped his 1975 tower in Cor-Ten steel, an alloy made to go unpainted, so it weathers to the rust-coloured skin that marks it out on the skyline.
Q 11Which Des Moines-based company built the 801 Grand tower, completed in 1991, on its downtown campus?
Principal Financial Group
Principal Financial Group: it faced the tower in granite that was quarried in Brazil, cut and polished in Italy and only then shipped to Iowa.
Q 12What sits on top of the 801 Grand tower?
An eight-sided copper pyramid
The tower is capped by an eight-sided copper pyramid; designers expected it to weather green, but the low-sulfur local air turned the copper a deep brown instead.
Q 13Des Moines has been nicknamed the 'Hartford of the West' because of which industry?
Insurance
Q 21How many domes crown the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines?
Five
Five: one large central dome with a smaller one at each corner. A fire swept through the building beneath them in 1904, while its gas lights were being converted to electricity.
Q 22The Iowa State Capitol's central dome is covered in what?
23-karat gold leaf
23-karat gold leaf: the sheets are tissue-thin, and the dome has been regilded several times, most recently in 1998 and 1999 at a cost of about $482,000.
Q 23Which songwriting duo set their only musical written directly for film at the Iowa State Fair?
Rodgers and Hammerstein
Rodgers and Hammerstein: their 1945 film State Fair follows an Iowa farm family to the fair in Des Moines, but when Hollywood remade it in 1962 the story was moved to Texas.
Insurance firms began clustering in Des Moines in the late 1800s, earning it the 'Hartford of the West' tag after Connecticut's insurance capital; Iowa's low premium tax helped keep them there.
Q 14Which magazine did Des Moines-based Meredith Corporation publish before merging with Dotdash?
Better Homes and Gardens
Better Homes and Gardens: Edwin Meredith, who had been Woodrow Wilson's agriculture secretary, first published it under the title Fruit, Garden and Home and gave it its famous name soon afterwards.
Q 15Which future US president worked as a sportscaster at Des Moines radio station WHO?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan worked as a sportscaster at WHO in Des Moines from 1933 to 1937, recreating baseball games from telegraph reports before leaving for Hollywood.
Q 16Which masked heavy metal band was formed in Des Moines in 1995?
Slipknot
Slipknot formed in Des Moines in 1995 and titled their second album, released in 2001, simply Iowa.
Q 17Bill Bryson's memoir about growing up in 1950s Des Moines is The Life and Times of the what?
Thunderbolt Kid
Thunderbolt Kid: the title is the superhero alter ego Bryson invented for himself as a boy, complete with imagined superpowers.
Q 18Both of Bill Bryson's parents worked for which local institution?
The Register newspaper
The Register newspaper: his father, Bill Sr., went off each autumn to cover the World Series for it, 32 years in a row, while his mother, Mary, wrote about home furnishings.
Q 19Which Des Moines-born actress won an Oscar for her role in The Last Picture Show?
Cloris Leachman
Cloris Leachman: born in Des Moines in 1926, she went through Roosevelt High School and reached the 1946 Miss America pageant as Miss Chicago, then spent her winnings on acting school in New York.
Q 20Edna Griffin was refused ice cream in 1948 at which Des Moines business, sparking sit-ins and a landmark court case?
Katz Drug Store
Katz Drug Store: after pickets and sit-ins led by Griffin, Maurice Katz was convicted under Iowa's 1884 civil rights law and fined $50, a verdict the state Supreme Court upheld in 1949.
Q 24The very first Iowa State Fair, in 1854, was held in which town?
Fairfield
Fairfield: the first fair ran there for three days in October 1854 on a budget of $323, and the event then moved from town to town for decades before Des Moines gave it a permanent home.
Q 25The Iowa State Fair's famous life-size cow, a fixture since 1911, is sculpted from what?
Butter
Butter: the sculptor layers about 600 pounds of it over a wood-and-wire frame inside a cooler kept near 40 degrees, until a life-size dairy cow emerges.
Q 26Which act drew a record 26,200 people to the Iowa State Fair grandstand across two shows in 1972?
Sonny and Cher
Sonny and Cher: their 1972 total was counted across two shows, which is how it topped any single night; the Beach Boys came within a thousand of it in 1975 with one performance.
Q 27Roughly how many people attended the 11-day Iowa State Fair in 2024?
About 1.2 million
About 1.2 million: the 2024 count was 1,182,682, then a record, for an event that has been called off only for an 1898 exposition in Omaha, World War II and the 2020 pandemic.
Q 28Which Triple-A baseball team plays its home games where Des Moines' two rivers meet?
Iowa Cubs
Iowa Cubs: the club kept its old name, the Iowa Oaks, through its first season as Chicago's top farm team in 1981, and only took the parent club's name the following year.
Q 29Future Super Bowl MVP Kurt Warner played arena football in the 1990s for which Des Moines team?
Iowa Barnstormers
Iowa Barnstormers: Warner had been stocking supermarket shelves on the night shift when the newly formed arena team signed him in 1995, and by January 2000 he was a Super Bowl MVP.
Q 30Des Moines' NBA G League team was bought and renamed in 2017 by which NBA franchise?
Minnesota Timberwolves
Minnesota Timberwolves: they bought the Iowa Energy, until then the Memphis Grizzlies' affiliate, and renamed it the Iowa Wolves, while the Grizzlies started a new team of their own near Memphis.