New Hampshire Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This New Hampshire trivia quiz has 118 free questions with answers and runs the length of the Granite State, from its 18 miles of coastline to the summit of Mount Washington. It covers the basics everyone should know - the capital, the largest city, the state bird and the motto - and then digs into the stories behind them: John Stark's 1809 toast, the first-in-the-nation primary and the midnight voters of Dixville Notch, the collapse of the Old Man of the Mountain and the 231 mph gust that held the world wind record for six decades. There are questions on the people New Hampshire produced too - Franklin Pierce, Alan Shepard, Christa McAuliffe, Daniel Webster, Sarah Josepha Hale, Bode Miller, Adam Sandler and Seth Meyers - along with Dartmouth, the Cog Railway, Bretton Woods, the Fisher Cats and the odd corners of state law, like the 400-member House and the missing seat belt rule. About a third of the questions are easy warm-ups; the rest climb toward the kind of detail only a lifelong Granite Stater would know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the official state motto of New Hampshire?
Live Free or Die
Live Free or Die. Too ill to attend an 1809 reunion of Bennington veterans, a Revolutionary War general sent the line in a written toast, and the state made it official in 1945.
Q 02Which city is the capital of New Hampshire?
Concord
Concord. The town was called Rumford until 1765, when it was renamed to mark the peaceful end of a bitter boundary dispute with the neighbouring town of Bow.
Q 03What is the most populous city in New Hampshire?
Manchester
Manchester. It was plain Derryfield until 1810, when it took the name of the English mill city that canal builder Samuel Blodget had hoped it would rival.
Q 04As the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, New Hampshire did what?
Put it into effect
Put it into effect. Article VII needed only nine of the thirteen states, so the new government could go ahead while Virginia and New York were still arguing.
Q 05Roughly how long is New Hampshire's Atlantic seacoast, the shortest ocean coastline of any state?
18 miles
18 miles. That is the open Atlantic shore alone; follow every tidal inlet and bay, as federal chartmakers do, and the shoreline stretches to 131 miles.
Q 06Which tax do New Hampshire and only four other U.S. states go without?
General sales tax
General sales tax. The state taxes no wages either, so it leans heavily on local property taxes to pay for its schools.
Q 07What is New Hampshire's official nickname?
The Granite State
The Granite State. The name honours its quarries, whose stone travelled as far as Washington, D.C., to help build the Library of Congress.
Q 08Which Canadian province borders New Hampshire to the north?
Quebec
Quebec. Thousands of French Canadians came south from the province for jobs in the textile mills, and their descendants remain a large share of the state's people.
Q 09What is New Hampshire's state bird?
Purple finch
Purple finch. The little songbird won the title in 1957 by beating a home-grown rival, the New Hampshire hen, a chicken breed another lawmaker had put forward.
Q 10Which state fruit of New Hampshire do most cooks treat as a vegetable?
Pumpkin
Pumpkin. Botany backs the 2006 law: a pumpkin is the seed-bearing fruit of a squash vine, technically a giant berry, however often it is cooked like a vegetable.
Q 11On January 5, 1776, New Hampshire became the first American colony to do what?
Adopt its own constitution
Adopt its own constitution. It replaced royal rule six months before July 4, yet stopped short of independence: the text said the colony would rejoice at a reconciliation with Britain.
Q 12The colony that became New Hampshire was named in 1629 after a county in which country?
England
England. Captain John Mason named his land grant after the county of Hampshire, yet he never saw it: he died in 1635 while preparing for his first visit.
Q 13What is the official name of New Hampshire's state legislature?
The General Court
Q 21After Mount Washington's Auto Road opened in 1861, which summit landmark followed in 1869?
The Cog Railway
The Cog Railway. Lawmakers laughed when its inventor asked for a charter, one joking he might as well build on to the Moon, yet it became the world's first mountain-climbing cog line.
Q 22Which Robin Williams film turned downtown Keene, New Hampshire, into the fictional town of Brantford?
Jumanji
Jumanji. A Parrish Shoes sign painted in Keene for the film became the gathering place for a memorial when Williams died in 2014.
Q 23On which mountain did the Old Man of the Mountain rock profile sit before it collapsed?
Cannon
The General Court. Only Massachusetts shares the title, and there it is a holdover from the Massachusetts Bay Company, whose general court began as a meeting of shareholders and turned into a colonial legislature.
Q 14How many members sit in New Hampshire's House of Representatives, the largest lower house of any state?
400
400. With that many seats, each member speaks for only about 3,400 residents, the fewest of any state house; a California assembly member answers to nearly half a million.
Q 15What annual salary does a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives receive?
$100
$100. The state constitution fixes pay at $200 for each two-year term plus mileage, so lawmakers cannot give themselves a raise without amending it.
Q 16Who won New Hampshire's 1952 Republican primary without ever setting foot in the state?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower. Supporters put the reluctant general on the ballot and he beat the favourite, Robert Taft, by 12 points, while President Truman lost the Democratic contest and soon quit the race.
Q 17Which tiny New Hampshire hamlet opens its polls at midnight to cast the primary's first ballots?
Dixville Notch
Dixville Notch. A polling place may close once every registered voter has cast a ballot, so its handful of voters all turn out at midnight and the result is known within minutes.
Q 18The Northeast's highest peak, at 6,288 feet, crowns which range of New Hampshire's White Mountains?
Presidential Range
Presidential Range. Its ridge runs north to south across several converging storm tracks, which is why the peaks named for Washington, Adams and Jefferson are notorious for wild weather.
Q 19What wind speed did the Mount Washington Observatory record in April 1934, then a world record?
231 mph
231 mph. The gust stood as the world record for 62 years, until an instrument on Australia's Barrow Island caught a stronger one inside Cyclone Olivia in 1996.
Q 20Which Mount Washington cirque is the Northeast's best-known spring backcountry ski spot?
Tuckerman
Tuckerman. Spring skiers reach it the hard way, climbing the ravine on foot with their gear before dropping down slopes as steep as 50 degrees.
Cannon. The face is gone, but at the plaza below the cliff visitors sight along steel profilers that line up to put its outline back on the mountain.
Q 24What finally brought down the Old Man of the Mountain?
Freezing and thawing
Freezing and thawing. Water had prised at the ledges for centuries, and the rods and turnbuckles added to pin them could not hold when the rock gave way one night in May 2003.
Q 25Which author drew on the Old Man of the Mountain for the 1850 short story 'The Great Stone Face'?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his tale a villager named Ernest waits a lifetime for the great man prophesied to resemble the face, until neighbours see that the likeness is his own.
Q 26In 2000 the Old Man of the Mountain appeared on which U.S. coin?
Quarter
Quarter. New Hampshire's entry in the fifty-coin state series showed the profile, and within three years it was honouring a landmark that no longer existed.
Q 27Which Revolutionary War general's 1809 toast later became New Hampshire's motto?
John Stark
John Stark. Passed over for promotion, he quit the Continental Army in 1777, then came back months later at the head of New Hampshire militia and won the Battle of Bennington.
Q 28George Maynard, who won a 1977 Supreme Court case over covering the motto on his New Hampshire plates, followed which faith?
Jehovah's Witness
Jehovah's Witness. Maynard said the motto clashed with his beliefs, and the justices agreed that a state cannot make drivers carry a message they reject on their own cars.
Q 29What is the largest body of fresh water in New Hampshire?
Winnipesaukee
Winnipesaukee. The 1991 comedy What About Bob? is set on its shore, but Bill Murray never filmed there: a lake in Virginia stood in for it.
Q 30On which New Hampshire lake was most of the 1981 film On Golden Pond shot?
Squam
Squam. The story was inspired by its author's summers on a pond elsewhere in New England, but when Hollywood came calling the cameras set up on this New Hampshire lake instead.