Little Rock
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50 free Little Rock trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Little Rock packs a surprising amount of American history into a mid-sized river city. Nine teenagers walking into a high school here in 1957 changed the course of the civil rights movement, a future president launched his campaign from its downtown, and Hollywood has borrowed its buildings more than once. This quiz covers the whole story: the territorial squabbles behind the city's founding, the Civil War and Reconstruction years, the 1957 crisis and the people at its center, plus the museums, bridges, businesses, musicians, actors and athletes that locals like to claim. It is written for anyone who lives in or loves central Arkansas, and it works well for a trivia night. Hosts in Little Rock can read the questions aloud, and every answer comes with a short explanation to settle arguments at the table.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1939 Hollywood epic shows the Old Mill, a park landmark across the river from Little Rock, in its opening credits?
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind shows a mill that was only ever scenery. It was built in 1933 as a tourist attraction, with concrete sculpted to pass for old wood.
Q 02Which 1980s sitcom set in Atlanta used Little Rock's Villa Marre as the exterior of the Sugarbaker sisters' firm?
Designing Women
Designing Women borrowed a second Little Rock address too: the Arkansas Governor's Mansion appeared on screen as the home of Suzanne Sugarbaker.
Q 03Which World War II general was born at a Little Rock army arsenal whose last building is now a military museum?
Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur was born there in 1880 while his father, a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient, was posted to the barracks. The park around the museum now carries the family name.
Q 04Which US president sent 101st Airborne paratroopers to Little Rock in 1957 so nine Black students could enter school?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower also took the 10,000-strong Arkansas National Guard under federal command, so troops who had been used to block the students ended up protecting them.
Q 05Which rock band was formed after Amy Lee and Ben Moody met as teenagers at a youth camp in Little Rock?
Evanescence
Evanescence started out playing acoustic sets in Little Rock bookstores and coffee houses. The album Fallen then sold more than four million copies in the US within a year.
Q 06TCBY, which opened its first shop in Little Rock in 1981, grew into a worldwide chain selling which dessert?
Frozen yogurt
Frozen yogurt is said to have so surprised founder Frank Hickingbotham at a Dallas department store that his disbelief became the shop's first name. A rival's lawsuit in 1984 forced a change.
Q 07Which Tex-Mex appetizer, popularized in Arkansas in 1935, got its own world championship in Little Rock in 2010?
Cheese dip
Cheese dip took off when restaurateur Blackie Donnelly swapped fresh Mexican queso for processed American cheese, which stays melted far longer on the table.
Q 08The Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock contains a full-scale replica of which famous White House room?
Oval Office
The Oval Office replica sits in a glass building that juts out over the river like an unfinished bridge, echoing the bridge metaphor of the 1996 re-election campaign.
Q 09Which stray tuxedo cat, adopted by the Clinton family in Little Rock in 1991, went on to live in the White House?
Socks
Socks chose his owners by jumping into Chelsea Clinton's arms outside her piano teacher's house. He never accepted Buddy the Labrador and retired with the president's secretary.
Q 10Little Rock's Esse museum tells the story of American women in the 1900s through which fashion accessory?
Handbags
Handbags and the everyday things women carried inside them fill the Esse Purse Museum, whose name is the Latin verb meaning to be.
Q 11Which civil rights leader sat with the family of Ernest Green at his 1958 graduation from Little Rock Central High?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was in Arkansas to give a college commencement speech in Pine Bluff, and joined the family to watch the school's first Black graduate collect his diploma.
Q 12Little Rock investment bank Stephens Inc. helped which future retail giant sell its first public shares in 1970?
Walmart
Walmart raised just $4.95 million in that offering, selling 300,000 shares at $16.50 each while Sam Walton's discount chain was still a small Arkansas business.
Q 13Which 1968 Western novel by longtime Little Rock resident Charles Portis became a John Wayne film a year later?
True Grit
Q 21Which Little Rock newspaper publisher, who mentored the nine students of 1957, now has a statue in the US Capitol?
Daisy Bates
Daisy Bates ran the Arkansas State Press with her husband, and their house was the students' daily pick-up and drop-off point. It is now a National Historic Landmark.
Q 22The domed capitol building in Little Rock, completed in 1915, stands on land previously occupied by which institution?
The state penitentiary
The state penitentiary sat on land a governor called too valuable for a prison, and 200 of its convicts were put to work on the new building to save money.
Q 23Which famous jewelry firm supplied the ten-foot bronze front doors of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock?
True Grit gave John Wayne his Academy Award-winning role as the one-eyed lawman Rooster Cogburn. Portis stayed out of the spotlight in Little Rock until his death in 2020.
Q 14At which Little Rock landmark did Bill Clinton launch his first presidential run and hold both election-night parties?
Old State House
The Old State House is the oldest surviving state capitol building west of the Mississippi River. Lawmakers left it for a new capitol in the early 1910s, and it is now a museum of Arkansas history.
Q 15With which weapon did the speaker of the Arkansas House kill a fellow lawmaker during an 1837 debate in Little Rock?
Bowie knife
A Bowie knife ended an argument over bounties for wolf scalps after the speaker took a colleague's joke as a personal insult. A jury later found him not guilty of murder.
Q 16The 4,226-foot Big Dam Bridge across the river at Little Rock was built to carry which kind of traffic?
Walkers and cyclists
Walkers and cyclists owe the name to a county judge who vowed to get that dam bridge built, a pun he insisted referred only to the lock and dam it stands on.
Q 17Which member of the Little Rock Nine was photographed walking alone past a jeering crowd outside Central High in 1957?
Elizabeth Eckford
Elizabeth Eckford arrived by herself because the meeting place was changed the night before and her family had no telephone, so the fifteen-year-old never got the message.
Q 18Little Rock charity Heifer International began in 1944 by shipping 17 dairy cows to poor families on which island?
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico received cows named Faith, Hope and Charity, and each family had to promise its first female calf to another poor family, a rule the charity still applies.
Q 19Which Baseball Hall of Famer born in Little Rock won 16 straight Gold Gloves at third base for Baltimore?
Brooks Robinson
Brooks Robinson fielded so cleanly that he was nicknamed the Human Vacuum Cleaner, and his glove work against Cincinnati made him the 1970 World Series MVP.
Q 20Which Arkansas governor used the National Guard in 1957 to keep nine Black students out of Little Rock Central High?
Orval Faubus
Orval Faubus went further the next year and shut the city's public high schools for the whole 1958-59 term, a stretch still known locally as the Lost Year.
Tiffany & Co.
The $10,000 doors, each four inches thick, came from Tiffany & Co. The domed building behind them stood in for the US Capitol in the 1986 TV drama Under Siege.
Q 24Little Rock has been world headquarters of the ATA since 1977, an organization devoted to teaching which martial art?
Taekwondo
Taekwondo grandmaster Haeng Ung Lee moved his association from Omaha, Nebraska, saying the hills of central Arkansas reminded him of his Korean homeland.
Q 25The submarine USS Razorback, docked opposite Little Rock, is named not for the Arkansas mascot but for which sea animal?
A whale
A whale is the source: razorback is another name for the rorquals, the family of whales with grooved throats. The boat was in Tokyo Bay when Japan formally surrendered in 1945.
Q 26The retired cruiser USS Little Rock, the first Navy ship named for the Arkansas capital, is a museum ship in which city?
Buffalo
Buffalo received the ship in 1977 after a tow from Philadelphia through the St. Lawrence Seaway. She is the last surviving cruiser of the 27-ship Cleveland class.
Q 27Which department store chain, begun as a small-town Arkansas shop in 1938, keeps its headquarters in Little Rock?
Dillard's
Dillard's takes its name from founder William T. Dillard, who sold his first store in Nashville, Arkansas, in 1948 to move into a bigger department store in Texarkana.
Q 28Lorelei Lee, the showgirl from Little Rock, is the heroine of which musical filmed with Marilyn Monroe in 1953?
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes reached Broadway in 1949, where the part of the blonde from Arkansas introduced Carol Channing. Monroe took the role over for the film.
Q 29Which Little Rock-born guard won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers between 2000 and 2010?
Derek Fisher
Derek Fisher played for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock before the Lakers drafted him in 1996, then won three straight titles beside Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.
Q 30The 1957 school crisis in Little Rock grew out of which 1954 Supreme Court ruling against segregated public schools?
Brown v. Board
Brown v. Board was tested again in 1958 in Cooper v. Aaron, a case from the same Little Rock dispute, when the justices ruled that every state is bound by the Court's decisions.