New York State Trivia
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123 free New York State trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
76 free New York State trivia questions with answers. New York is a lot more than New York City, and this quiz deliberately heads upstate. It covers the Dutch and English colonial story, the Revolutionary War battles fought on New York soil, the Erie Canal, the Adirondacks and Catskills, Niagara Falls, the Finger Lakes and the Thousand Islands, plus the cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany and what each is known for. There are questions on state symbols, from the motto Excelsior to the schoolgirl who lobbied for a state insect, on the foods the state claims (Buffalo wings, Jell-O, the potato chip legend), on presidents born in small New York towns, and on Woodstock, Cooperstown, Lake Placid, Saratoga and Seneca Falls. The first questions suit a classroom or a family road trip; later ones will test lifelong residents. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on the state, its cities, parks and landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it once you answer. Free, no signup.
30 of 123 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of New York State?
Albany
Albany. New York's first capital was Kingston, which the British burned in 1777, and Albany became the permanent capital in 1797.
Q 02What is New York State's best-known nickname?
The Empire State
The Empire State. Nobody knows who coined it, and the Manhattan skyscraper that opened in 1931 borrowed the state's nickname, not the other way round.
Q 03Which mountain is the highest point in New York State?
Mount Marcy
Mount Marcy. A survey party made the first recorded climb in 1837 and named the peak for William Marcy, the governor who had ordered their survey.
Q 04Which county is the borough of Brooklyn?
Kings County
Kings County. Five of the state's 62 counties are the city's boroughs, and Brooklyn stayed a separate city until 1898, after its voters had narrowly backed joining New York.
Q 05Which essays urged New York to ratify the Constitution?
The Federalist Papers
The Federalist Papers. Hamilton, Madison and Jay wrote all 85 under one pen name, Publius, yet New York ratified only 11th, and by just three votes.
Q 06What was Henry Hudson seeking when he sailed up New York's Hudson River in 1609?
A passage to Asia
A passage to Asia. The Dutch East India Company had sent him east around the top of Russia; when that route failed, he ignored his orders and crossed the Atlantic to look for a western way through instead.
Q 07What was the name of the Dutch colony that England seized and renamed the Province of New York in 1664?
New Netherland
New Netherland. The colonists refused to fight the English fleet, and the colony was renamed for its new owner, the king's brother James, Duke of York.
Q 08Who was director-general of the Dutch colony from 1647 until it was ceded to England?
Peter Stuyvesant
He expanded New Amsterdam beyond the southern tip of Manhattan before surrendering it in 1664.
Q 09Which governor championed the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825?
DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt Clinton. Opponents ridiculed the canal as 'Clinton's Folly', but in 1825 he rode the first boat from Lake Erie to New York City and emptied a keg of lake water into the sea.
Q 10What moved boats along the original Erie Canal when it opened in 1825?
Mules and horses
Mules and horses. Teams walked a towpath beside the water, towing boats along all 363 miles, and the old towpath is now a cycling trail across the state.
Q 11Which 1777 New York battle persuaded France to ally with the American revolutionaries?
Saratoga
Saratoga. Benedict Arnold was wounded in the leg leading the decisive assault, three years before he turned traitor, and General Burgoyne surrendered his whole army.
Q 12Which northern New York stronghold was captured by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold on May 10, 1775?
Fort Ticonderoga
Fort Ticonderoga. The raiders surprised the sleeping garrison, and the fort's captured cannons helped drive the British out of Boston the following spring.
Q 13The women's rights convention that produced the Declaration of Sentiments met in which New York town?
Seneca Falls
Q 21A now-discredited legend credits the potato chip's invention to a cook in which New York resort town?
Saratoga Springs
Saratoga Springs. The tale has cook George Crum frying paper-thin slices to spite a fussy diner, whom later retellings turned into the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Q 22Cayuga, Keuka and Skaneateles all belong to which group of central New York lakes?
The Finger Lakes
The Finger Lakes. Ice-age glaciers deepened a row of north-south river valleys, and the long, skinny lakes left behind fan out across the map like fingers.
Q 23The Thousand Islands dot which river on New York's northern border?
St. Lawrence River
Seneca Falls. Elizabeth Cady Stanton modeled the text on the Declaration of Independence, and only one signer, Charlotte Woodward, lived to see women win the vote in 1920.
Q 14In which city was Susan B. Anthony arrested in 1872 for voting?
Rochester
Rochester. She was fined $100 for casting a ballot in the 1872 presidential election and never paid a cent of it.
Q 15Harriet Tubman spent her later years in which New York city?
Auburn
Auburn. She opened a home for the elderly beside her farm there and spent her own last two years as one of its patients.
Q 16The 1969 Woodstock festival was actually held on a dairy farm in which town?
Bethel
Bethel. Wallkill banned the festival about a month before showtime, so dairy farmer Max Yasgur rented the promoters his fields instead.
Q 17Which village in Otsego County is home to the National Baseball Hall of Fame?
Cooperstown
Cooperstown. The village was chosen on the strength of a legend, later discredited, that Abner Doubleday invented baseball there in 1839.
Q 18Which New York village hosted the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980?
Lake Placid
Lake Placid. Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the 1932 Games there, nine months before he was elected president.
Q 19The spicy wings named for a western New York city were reportedly invented where in 1964?
Anchor Bar
Anchor Bar. In one of several rival stories, co-owner Teressa Bellissimo cooked up wings in hot sauce as a late-night snack for her son and his friends.
Q 20Which sweet treat was born in Le Roy, New York, in 1897 and still has a museum there?
Jell-O
Jell-O. Carpenter Pearle Wait trademarked the name in Le Roy, and the dessert was made there until the factory left for Delaware in 1964.
St. Lawrence River. On one island, hotel magnate George Boldt was building a castle for his wife; when she died he stopped all work at once, and it stood empty for some seventy years.
Q 24Which river's valley carried the Erie Canal west through the Appalachians?
Mohawk
Mohawk. Its valley is a natural break in the Appalachian barrier, so pioneers bound for the Great Lakes, and later the canal itself, all funnelled through it.
Q 25Which New York park, created in 1892, is bigger than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier and Grand Canyon combined?
Adirondack Park
Adirondack Park. About half the land inside its boundary is private, towns and all, while the state constitution keeps the public half 'forever wild'.
Q 26Who campaigned in the 1880s to make the land around Niagara's falls a public park?
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted. His plans and years of lobbying persuaded New York to buy the privately held land around the falls and turn it into a public reservation.
Q 27Which of the three Niagara waterfalls straddles the international border?
Horseshoe Falls
Horseshoe Falls. It carries about nine-tenths of the river's water and is often called the Canadian Falls, since only a small part of it lies on the New York side.
Q 28Why did 63-year-old schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor ride a barrel over Niagara's falls in 1901?
To make her fortune
To make her fortune. She took the plunge on her 63rd birthday and came out battered but alive, yet the fame cooled fast and the money never came.
Q 29In March 1848, what reduced the mighty falls at Niagara to a trickle?
An ice jam
An ice jam. Ice from Lake Erie plugged the river's mouth around midnight, the water-powered mills fell silent, and hundreds came to stare at the trickle that was left.
Q 30What is New York's official state bird?
Eastern bluebird
Eastern bluebird. Missouri claims it too, and the species rebounded from a mid-century slump once volunteers lined roadsides and backyards with bluebird houses.