Illinois Trivia
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100 free Illinois trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Illinois trivia questions with answers. Illinois is where the skyscraper, the Ferris wheel, the Twinkie and the first nuclear reactor were built, where a river was made to run backwards, and where a former state capital ended up on the wrong side of the Mississippi. This quiz covers the whole state, not just Chicago: 1818 statehood and the three capitals, Lincoln's Springfield and his tomb, Cahokia's mounds, Nauvoo and Galena, the John Deere plow, Reagan's hometown, and the start of Route 66. Easy questions cover the state bird, the slogan, the Cubs' 2016 title and the river dyed green each March; harder ones get into the Black Hawk War, the Tully monster, the ORD airport code, the Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Illinois town that claims 99 percent of the world's canned pumpkin. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or an official page and the citation is shown under each question, so you can settle a Land of Lincoln argument on the spot. Good for road trips down I-55, bar trivia in Chicago and anyone who says IL-ih-NOY.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Illinois's border was pushed north in 1818 to reach which Great Lake?
Michigan
Lake Michigan frontage came from territorial delegate Nathaniel Pope, who had the border pushed north; the strip he added holds Chicago, which would otherwise have grown up outside Illinois.
Q 02Illinois calls itself the Land of Lincoln, but in which state was Abraham Lincoln born?
Kentucky
Kentucky is where Lincoln was born in 1809; his family moved to Indiana when he was seven, and he reached Illinois only at 21.
Q 03Illinois's official motto pairs 'National Union' with which phrase?
State Sovereignty
State Sovereignty comes first in the motto, which irked the Unionist official who redrew the seal in 1868: refused leave to swap the phrases, he twisted the banner so that Sovereignty reads upside down.
Q 04Long glossed as 'tribe of superior men', the name Illinois really comes from a Miami-Illinois phrase meaning what?
He speaks the regular way
He speaks the regular way is the linguists' gloss of irenwe·wa; French explorers learned the name second-hand from Ojibwe-speaking neighbours and spelled it their own way.
Q 05Which village, Illinois's first state capital, now sits west of the Mississippi with a Missouri ZIP code?
Kaskaskia
Kaskaskia was cut off in 1881 when a flood moved the Mississippi into a new channel east of the village, so its 21 residents (2020 census) can reach the rest of Illinois by road only through Missouri.
Q 06Springfield became Illinois's capital in 1839, replacing which town that had held the job for two decades?
Vandalia
Vandalia was also where the National Road, the first federal highway, came to a halt: federal money ran out in 1839 and it was never pushed on to the Mississippi.
Q 07What nickname did Abraham Lincoln and his fellow Sangamon County legislators earn while winning Springfield the state capital?
The Long Nine
The Long Nine were two senators and seven representatives who all stood about six feet or taller; Lincoln led their push in 1837 and moved to Springfield himself weeks after the vote.
Q 08In 1876 two Chicago criminals were caught trying to do what at Lincoln's tomb?
Steal his body for ransom
Steal his body for ransom was the plan: a counterfeiting gang wanted its jailed engraver freed, but one recruit was a Secret Service informant, and the coffin now lies under ten feet of concrete.
Q 09The 1908 Springfield race riot directly led to the founding of which organization?
NAACP
The NAACP grew out of a call for a national meeting that reformers, appalled by the mob violence in Lincoln's home town, issued on the centennial of his birth in February 1909.
Q 10Which open-faced sandwich of toast, meat, French fries and cheese sauce originated in Springfield?
Horseshoe
The horseshoe was first served at Springfield's Leland Hotel in 1928 with ham instead of today's usual hamburger patty; a half portion is called a pony shoe.
Q 11The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 is said to have started in a barn belonging to which family?
The O'Learys
The O'Learys' cow took the blame for over a century, though nobody knows what really happened in the barn; Chicago's City Council formally cleared Catherine O'Leary in 1997.
Q 12The Great Chicago Fire left about 100,000 people homeless; roughly how many did it kill?
300
About 300 people died, although a third of the city lay in ruins; the Peshtigo fire that broke out in Wisconsin the same night killed well over a thousand.
Q 13Under what name did Chicago's 110-story Willis skyscraper open in 1973?
Sears Tower
It was the world's tallest building for nearly 25 years, and the retractable glass boxes on its 103rd-floor Skydeck are called The Ledge.
Q 21The first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction took place in 1942 under the stands of which Chicago venue?
Stagg Field
Stagg Field had sat largely unused since its university gave up football in 1939, so Enrico Fermi's team built their reactor in an old racquets court under the stands.
Q 22Fermilab near Batavia is famous for physics and for a herd of which animal roaming its grounds?
Bison
Bison came with founding director Robert Wilson, a Wyoming native who started the herd with a bull and four cows.
Q 23Which is the official state bird of Illinois?
Northern cardinal
The northern cardinal is the state bird of seven states, more than any other species, and Amtrak's Chicago to Washington train is called the Cardinal because it serves six of them.
Q 14Chicago reversed the flow of its river in 1900 chiefly to protect what?
Drinking water
Drinking water for the city came from the lake the river emptied into, sewage and all; a canal finished in 1900 turned the flow inland toward the Illinois River instead.
Q 15For which holiday is the Chicago River dyed green each year?
St. Patrick's Day
St. Patrick's Day dyeing began by accident, when plumbers were using a green dye to trace illegal waste pipes emptying into the river; their union still runs the event.
Q 16Chicago's World's Fair of 1893 marked the 400th anniversary of what?
Columbus's arrival in the Americas
Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492 was the occasion, but the fair ran a year late: its buildings were dedicated in October 1892 and the gates opened only in May 1893.
Q 17Which ride made its debut at the 1893 Chicago fair?
Ferris Wheel
The Ferris Wheel was built to rival the Eiffel Tower, star of the 1889 Paris fair: it stood 264 feet tall, and each of its 36 cars could carry up to 60 riders.
Q 18Chicago's Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885, is often called the world's first what?
Skyscraper
Skyscraper is a generous word for a ten-story block, but William Le Baron Jenney carried most of its weight on a metal frame rather than thick masonry walls, the idea later towers were built on.
Q 19Deep-dish pizza was invented in 1943 at which Chicago restaurant?
Pizzeria Uno
The style puts the chunky tomato sauce on top of the cheese, and 'stuffed' pizza with a second dough layer came along in the 1970s.
Q 20The name Chicago is usually traced to a Miami-Illinois word for what?
A wild onion relative
A wild onion relative, the pungent ramp, grew thickly here, and a French visitor in 1687 said the place was named for it; another reading ties the name to the related word for skunk.
Q 24Thanks to an elementary school project, which food became Illinois's official state snack?
Popcorn
Popcorn got the title after second and third graders at a Joliet elementary school proposed it with their teacher's help; hundreds of Illinois farms grow the crop.
Q 25What is Illinois's state fossil, a Mazon Creek oddity nicknamed after the amateur collector who found it?
Tully monster
The Tully monster so baffled Field Museum scientists that it was simply named for collector Francis Tully; they still can't agree whether it was a vertebrate, a mollusc or something else.
Q 26Which Illinois town claims that 99 percent of the world's canned pumpkin is produced there?
Morton
Morton owes the boast to its Libby's cannery, the brand behind the vast majority of America's canned pumpkin, and it throws a four-day Pumpkin Festival every September.
Q 27What is the name of Cahokia's ten-story central platform, the largest man-made earthwork north of Mexico?
Monks Mound
Monks Mound is named for the French Trappist monks who settled nearby and gardened on its terraces in the early 1800s, centuries after the city that built it had emptied.
Q 28Black Hawk, whose 1832 war was fought in Illinois and Wisconsin, was a leader of which nation?
Sauk
Sauk families followed Black Hawk back across the Mississippi, apparently hoping to reclaim their homeland; a 23-year-old volunteer named Abraham Lincoln served against them without ever seeing combat.
Q 29Ronald Reagan grew up in Dixon, but in which small Illinois town was he born in 1911?
Tampico
Tampico was the family's home twice: Reagan was born in an apartment there, lived in Chicago, Galesburg and Monmouth, came back, and settled in Dixon only in 1920.
Q 30While an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama also taught constitutional law at which university?
University of Chicago
University of Chicago law students had Obama as a lecturer for twelve years, until he won his US Senate seat in 2004; he had first come to the city as a community organizer.