Maryland Trivia
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120 free Maryland trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
63 free Maryland trivia questions with answers. Maryland packs mountains, bay, beach and two centuries of national history into the ninth-smallest state, and this quiz covers all of it. The questions range across the state's founding by the Calverts and the Toleration Act, the Mason-Dixon survey, Fort McHenry and the Star-Spangled Banner, Antietam, the B&O Railroad, Annapolis as temporary US capital and the Naval Academy, the flag's Calvert and Crossland quarters, jousting as the state sport, blue crabs and Old Bay, Smith Island cake, Assateague's horses, the Preakness, the Bay Bridge, Camp David, and famous Marylanders from Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass to Thurgood Marshall, Poe, Cal Ripken and Michael Phelps. Easy questions ask the capital and the state flower; hard ones want who coined the 'Free State' nickname, the colt behind the Preakness name and how narrow the state gets near Hancock. Built for pub quizzes, classrooms, and Marylanders defending their crab-cake supremacy. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Maryland and its places, people and symbols, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Maryland, chartered in 1632, was named for Henrietta Maria, the wife of which English king?
Charles I
Charles I granted the charter in June 1632 to Cecil Calvert, whose father had asked for it but died weeks before it was sealed; the colony was named for the king's wife.
Q 02What is the capital of Maryland?
Annapolis
Annapolis, not much bigger Baltimore, has been the capital since the 1690s, when royal governor Francis Nicholson moved the government there and laid out the new town's plan himself.
Q 03Maryland held out until 1781 before ratifying which document?
Articles of Confederation
The Articles of Confederation needed every state, and Maryland refused until 1781, once bigger states agreed to give up their western land claims; it went on to ratify the US Constitution as the seventh state in April 1788.
Q 04The Province of Maryland was chartered in 1632 primarily as a haven for which persecuted group?
Catholics
Catholics were a minority even in their own haven: most of the labourers and servants on the first two ships in 1633 are said to have been Protestant, though Catholic gentlemen led the venture.
Q 05Maryland's varied landscapes, from Appalachian mountains to Atlantic beaches, earned it what nickname?
America in Miniature
America in Miniature is the tourism office's favourite line: the ninth-smallest state is said to hold almost every kind of natural feature except a desert, because water is never far away.
Q 06Maryland's 'Free State' nickname was revived in 1923 by a Baltimore editor mocking demands that it enforce what?
Prohibition
Prohibition never got a state enforcement act in Maryland. When a Georgia congressman called the state a traitor for that, Sun editor Hamilton Owens drafted a mock call to secede as 'the Maryland Free State'.
Q 07Maryland's highest point, Hoye Crest at 3,360 feet, sits on which ridge?
Backbone Mountain
Backbone Mountain carries the Eastern Continental Divide: rain on one side runs to the Atlantic, while the country beyond it is the only part of Maryland that drains to the Mississippi.
Q 08Near Hancock, Maryland is under two miles wide between the Mason-Dixon line and which river?
The Potomac
The Potomac marks Maryland's border with Virginia and West Virginia, and at Hancock it swings north toward the dead-straight surveyed line, pinching Maryland into a waist less than two miles across.
Q 09Washington, D.C.'s land came from Maryland's Montgomery County and which other county?
Prince George's
Prince George's and Montgomery supplied the Maryland side of the original diamond; Virginia's share was later handed back, so today the whole District sits on former Maryland land.
Q 10Lacrosse is Maryland's team sport, but what is its official state sport?
Jousting
Jousting made Maryland the first state with an official sport. It is the ring version: riders gallop under a row of arches spearing small hanging rings, and nobody is knocked out of the saddle.
Q 11What is Maryland's state flower?
Black-eyed Susan
Black-eyed Susan blankets drape the winners at Maryland's biggest race meeting each May, but they are stand-ins: florists build them from Viking poms, a yellow chrysanthemum with a brown centre.
Q 12Which reptile is both a Maryland native and the mascot of the University of Maryland?
Diamondback terrapin
Diamondback terrapin was the football coach's idea for a mascot in 1932; the bronze statue of Testudo outside the campus library now has a nose polished bright by people rubbing it for luck.
Q 13Which Chesapeake Bay catch has a scientific name that translates as 'beautiful savoury swimmer'?
Blue crab
Q 21Which Maryland railroad, the first steam-operated common carrier in the US, opened its first stretch in 1830?
The B&O
The B&O was Baltimore's answer to the Erie Canal: merchants founded it in 1827 so that western trade would not all flow to New York, and it later earned a square on the Monopoly board.
Q 22In 2015, Maryland led all US states in which economic measure?
Median household income
Median household income is lifted by Washington next door: federal agencies, defence contractors and biotech labs fill Maryland's suburbs with well-paid jobs.
Q 23Which enormous white oak, Maryland's most famous tree, stood on the Eastern Shore until a storm felled it in 2002?
The Wye Oak
Blue crab is Callinectes sapidus, and the swimmer part is earned: its rear pair of legs is flattened into paddles, so it swims as readily as it walks.
Q 14Which two abolitionists were both born into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore?
Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass
Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass were born in Dorchester and Talbot counties, a few years apart. After escaping, Tubman went back about 13 times and led some 70 family and friends north.
Q 15BWI airport is named for which Baltimore-born Supreme Court justice?
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice, could not attend the University of Maryland's whites-only law school; in 1935 he came back as a lawyer and won the case that forced it to admit a Black student.
Q 16Which Maryland governor turned vice president resigned in 1973 after pleading no contest to tax evasion?
Spiro Agnew
Spiro Agnew had taken payments from contractors as Baltimore County executive and as governor, and prosecutors found they kept coming after he became vice president; Gerald Ford took his place.
Q 17Which Triple Crown race was first run at Baltimore's Pimlico track in 1873?
Preakness Stakes
Preakness Stakes is the Triple Crown's middle leg yet older than its first: Pimlico staged it two years before the Kentucky Derby was ever run.
Q 18Which crossing, opened in 1952, replaced the ferries between Maryland's Eastern and Western Shores?
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge ended centuries of ferry crossings, and Ocean City grew fast once the Atlantic beaches were a direct drive from Baltimore and Washington.
Q 19What kind of animals roam wild on Assateague Island off Maryland's coast?
Horses
Horses there are said in local legend to have swum ashore from a shipwreck, but the Park Service finds no record of it and thinks 17th-century owners grazed them on the island to dodge fencing laws and livestock taxes.
Q 20Which 1862 battle near Sharpsburg, Maryland, remains the bloodiest single day in American history?
Antietam
Antietam left about 23,000 men killed, wounded or missing in twelve hours. It ended Lee's first invasion of the North and prompted the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation days later.
The Wye Oak, then the largest white oak in the country, was not wasted: a section of its trunk became a desk for the governor's office, and a clone was planted in the old stump.
Q 24Maryland's flag combines the arms of the Calvert family with those of which other family?
Crossland
Crossland red and white became the 'secession colours' of Marylanders who sided with the South, while Unionists kept Calvert black and gold; a flag joining the two appeared as the state reconciled after the war.
Q 25By law, the only ornament allowed on top of a flagstaff flying the Maryland flag is what?
A gold cross bottony
A gold cross bottony, the bud-tipped cross from the flag's own red-and-white quarters, has been the only legal topper since 1945, so the eagle found on flagpoles elsewhere is not allowed here.
Q 26Which spooky parlour game was named in 1890 in Maryland by medium Helen Peters Nosworthy?
Ouija
Ouija is said to have named itself: asked at a Baltimore sitting what it should be called, the board spelled out the word, then told the group that it meant 'good luck'.
Q 27Which breed was declared Maryland's official state dog in 1964?
Chesapeake Bay Retriever
Chesapeake Bay Retriever lines are traced by tradition to Sailor and Canton, two pups said to have been taken off a sinking English brig in 1807 and bought from its captain for a guinea apiece.
Q 28Which seasoning was created in Baltimore in 1939 by a spice maker who had fled Nazi Germany?
Old Bay
Old Bay borrowed its name from the Old Bay Line, steamships that ran overnight between Baltimore and Norfolk; Gustav Brunn had first sold the mix as Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning.
Q 29Which baseball legend was born in Baltimore in 1895 and first turned professional with the minor-league Orioles?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth probably got his nickname there too: most accounts say older players teased the 19-year-old as one of owner Jack Dunn's 'babes' after Dunn signed him in 1914.
Q 30The presidential retreat Camp David lies in the wooded hills of which Maryland mountain?
Catoctin
Catoctin Mountain Park still surrounds the camp, which was built in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration as a holiday spot for federal employees and their families before the White House took it over in 1942.