Huntsville Trivia
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This Huntsville trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers and covers the whole story of Alabama's largest city: the 1805 settlement at the Big Spring, the brief run as state capital in 1819, the Union occupation of 1862, the Watercress Capital years, and the 1950 arrival of the German rocket team that turned a cotton town into the Rocket City. You will find questions on Redstone Arsenal, Marshall Space Flight Center, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center and Space Camp, Cummings Research Park, Alabama A&M and UAH, the Trash Pandas and Havoc, Monte Sano, Lowe Mill, Maple Hill Cemetery and the famous people born here, from Tallulah Bankhead to Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales. It works for newcomers, longtime locals, and anyone hosting a trivia night in North Alabama. Every answer was checked against a reference page (mostly Wikipedia and official sources) before it went in, and each question carries a short explanation with one extra fact. Difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a few that only a Huntsville lifer will get.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Redstone rocket, developed in Huntsville, launched which astronaut on America's first crewed spaceflight in 1961?
Alan Shepard
Alan Shepard. The rocket began as an Army missile designed by Wernher von Braun's team to carry warheads; adapted for a capsule, it lobbed Shepard on a 15-minute flight.
Q 02Before it took John Hunt's name in 1811, Huntsville was named after which English village, home of poet Alexander Pope?
Twickenham
Twickenham. Landowner LeRoy Pope picked the name, but with feeling against Britain rising before the War of 1812, the legislature swapped it for that of first settler John Hunt.
Q 03In 1819, delegates met in a Huntsville cabinet-maker's shop to do what?
Write Alabama's first state constitution
Write Alabama's first state constitution. The same building then hosted the first governor's inauguration and the new legislature, until the capital left Huntsville after a single session.
Q 04Huntsville is the county seat of which Alabama county?
Madison
Madison. The county was created in 1808, eleven years before statehood, around a squatters' village called Hunt's Spring on land the Cherokee and Chickasaw had only just ceded.
Q 05During the Great Depression, Huntsville was known as the world capital of which crop?
Watercress
Watercress. The area's spring-fed ponds could grow it right through the winter, so local growers shipped more of it to distant hotels and restaurants than anywhere else in the country.
Q 06The Union capture of Huntsville in April 1862 was coordinated with which raid on a Georgia railroad?
The Great Locomotive Chase
The Great Locomotive Chase. General Ormsby Mitchel, an astronomer in peacetime, took Huntsville on April 11; the next day volunteers from his division stole a train to wreck the line to Chattanooga.
Q 07Which railroad, the first to link the Atlantic with the Mississippi, built Huntsville's 1860 depot, Alabama's oldest?
Memphis and Charleston
Memphis and Charleston. After Union troops took the depot in 1862 they held Confederate prisoners on its third floor, and the graffiti the men left is still preserved.
Q 08Harrison Brothers, a fixture of downtown Huntsville since 1879, is Alabama's oldest operating what?
Hardware store
Hardware store. The brothers actually opened in 1879 as tobacconists; when the last Harrison died in 1983, a preservation foundation bought the shop, and volunteers still run it.
Q 09Huntsville Arsenal, the seed of today's Redstone Arsenal, was established in 1941 to produce what?
Chemical weapons
Chemical weapons. The plant turned out mustard gas, tear gas and smoke munitions; when peace made it surplus, the Army readied the site for disposal before choosing it for rocket research instead.
Q 10Wernher von Braun and his German rocket team reached the United States after World War II under which secret program?
Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip. The team spent five years at Fort Bliss, Texas, before the Army moved it to Redstone Arsenal in 1950, where the Germans settled, raised families and stayed.
Q 11What was America's first satellite, launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency on January 31, 1958?
Explorer 1
Explorer 1. Von Braun's Army team had been held back from a satellite attempt in favor of the Navy's Vanguard; turned loose after Sputnik, it reached orbit in under four months.
Q 12Which early space station, launched in 1973, was developed under Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center?
Skylab
Skylab. It was made from a spare Moon-rocket stage; when launch damage left it overheating in orbit, ground teams improvised a sunshade and the first crew saved the station.
Q 13Which president unveiled a bust of George C. Marshall at the Marshall Space Flight Center dedication?
Dwight Eisenhower
Q 21Which rocket stands as a full-scale vertical replica outside the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville?
Saturn V
Saturn V. The replica went up in 1999 for the 30th anniversary of the first Moon landing, while a genuine one, built for ground tests, hangs on its side in the hall next door.
Q 22Which part of the Apollo 16 spacecraft is on display at Huntsville's U.S. Space & Rocket Center?
The command module
The command module, call sign Casper, was the only part built to survive the return to Earth. On the way home, pilot Ken Mattingly climbed outside in deep space to fetch film from the ship's cameras.
Q 23Pathfinder, the full-size mockup displayed outside the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, stands in for which spacecraft?
Dwight Eisenhower. Calling himself 'an old foot soldier', he joked that the center's giant new rocket made itself heard 'possibly too loudly' in Huntsville, then unveiled the bust with the general's widow.
Q 14After the first Moon landings, Wernher von Braun left Huntsville in 1970 for a NASA post in which city?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. At NASA headquarters he was meant to plan the agency's future, but with budgets shrinking after Apollo he had little influence, and he left for private industry in 1972.
Q 15Wernher von Braun was born in 1912 in Wirsitz, a town that is today part of which country?
Poland
Poland. Wirsitz lay in Prussia, part of the German Empire, when he was born into an aristocratic family in 1912; he ended up an American citizen, sworn in during 1955.
Q 16Which entertainment figure teamed with Wernher von Braun on the 1955 TV film 'Man in Space'?
Walt Disney
Walt Disney. The partnership grew out of von Braun's magazine articles on spaceflight, and he went on to advise on further Disney space films and theme-park attractions.
Q 17Which NASA rocket, which first flew in 2022 for the Artemis Moon program, is managed from Huntsville's Marshall center?
Space Launch System
Space Launch System. Its core stage burns four engines that had already flown to orbit and back on earlier missions, a family of engines the Huntsville center helped develop.
Q 18Controllers at NASA's Marshall center in Huntsville run science operations around the clock for which spacecraft?
International Space Station
International Space Station. When astronauts need help with an experiment they radio 'Huntsville', the call sign of the payload control room at Marshall.
Q 19Wernher von Braun enlisted Bear Bryant and which Auburn coach to win the vote funding Huntsville's space museum?
Shug Jordan
Shug Jordan. Von Braun got Alabama's two great football rivals to back the campaign together, and voters approved the bonds for the museum, which opened in 1970.
Q 20Which Huntsville youth program, first suggested by Wernher von Braun, shares its name with a 1986 Hollywood film?
Space Camp
Space Camp. Von Braun raised the idea in 1977 after seeing schoolchildren take notes on a museum tour; it opened in 1982, five years after his death.
The Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle. Marshall built the steel-and-wood stand-in in 1977 to rehearse lifting and moving an orbiter; it never flew, and now rides an external tank and two boosters.
Q 24Cummings Research Park in Huntsville has long ranked as America's second-largest research park, behind which one?
Research Triangle Park
Research Triangle Park. Huntsville's park was laid out in 1962 to hold the contractors drawn by the Moon program, and has grown to about 300 companies.
Q 25The 2020 census made Huntsville Alabama's most populous city, ahead of which longtime leader?
Birmingham
Birmingham. It had shrunk from a 1960 peak of about 340,000 people to roughly 200,000, while Huntsville's aerospace and defense boom carried it past 215,000.
Q 26Huntsville sits in the valley of which river?
Tennessee
Tennessee. The town itself grew up around the Big Spring, well north of the river, and in 1831 a canal finally linked the two, giving Huntsville its own water route to market.
Q 27What drew 19th-century visitors up Monte Sano, the mountain overlooking Huntsville?
Mineral springs and clean air
Mineral springs and clean air: the name is Spanish for 'mountain of health', and a 233-room resort hotel once stood on the summit, reached by its own railway from downtown.
Q 28Monte Sano State Park, which opened in 1938, was largely built by which New Deal program?
Civilian Conservation Corps
Civilian Conservation Corps. Its crews quarried the mountain's own stone for the cabins, lodge and amphitheater, and the cabins are still rented to visitors today.
Q 29Which Huntsville museum began when a physician willed his mansion and estate to the city in 1955?
Burritt on the Mountain
Burritt on the Mountain. Dr. William Burritt built the eccentric house in the 1930s with money inherited from his late wife, and left the whole estate to Huntsville when he died.
Q 30Which Huntsville attraction stages the Galaxy of Lights, a holiday display of illuminated scenes, each winter?
Huntsville Botanical Garden
Huntsville Botanical Garden. Volunteers began clearing the site in 1984, four years before it opened, and the garden still leans on a large volunteer corps to stage events like this one.