Obscure Presidential Trivia
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60 free Obscure Presidential trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This obscure presidential trivia quiz skips the famous stuff. There is no question about who was first, who was assassinated or who resigned. Instead you get the president who took his oath from his own father by kerosene lamp at 2:47 a.m., the one who personally hanged a murderer as a county sheriff, the one who had a tumour cut out of his jaw on a friend's yacht and kept it secret for decades, the vice president who was sworn in in Cuba, and the president whose grandson was still alive in 2025. The questions run from the Founders (Washington's distillery and dentures, Jefferson's swivel chair, Adams's last words) through the forgotten 19th-century presidents (Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Johnson, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley) to modern deep cuts on Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Bush, Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden. Most sit at hard or expert difficulty; a few easier ones are there so a table does not go scoreless. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia biographies and each question shows its source, so the weird facts here are ones you can defend at trivia night.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which president was the first Catholic to hold the office and, at 43, the youngest ever elected?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy. With some Protestant ministers saying no Catholic could act free of his church, he went to Houston to tell a gathering of them that he did not speak for the church and it did not speak for him.
Q 02Which president is the only one who never married?
James Buchanan
James Buchanan. His fiancée broke off their engagement over gossip and died within days; her family barred him from the funeral, and he later put his single life down to devotion to her.
Q 03Which president was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013?
Donald Trump
Donald Trump. At WrestleMania 23 in 2007 he backed the winning wrestler in a 'Battle of the Billionaires' against WWE chairman Vince McMahon, then helped to shave McMahon's head in the ring.
Q 04As a law student, Barack Obama made national news when he was elected the first Black president of which publication?
Harvard Law Review
Harvard Law Review. The attention brought Obama a publisher's contract for a book on race relations, and what he wrote instead was the memoir Dreams from My Father.
Q 05Which president is the only one to hold a patent, for a device to lift boats over river shoals?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln. Boats he worked on as a young man ran aground at least twice, which gave him the idea of inflatable bellows fixed along the hull, but the device was never manufactured.
Q 06Which president kept a jar of jelly beans on his desk, a habit that began as a substitute for smoking?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan wrote to his supplier while governor of California that his team could hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around the jar of jelly beans.
Q 07Which president's middle initial stands for no name at all?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman's 'S' was a compromise that honoured both his grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young, without choosing between them.
Q 08Which president took the oath of office aboard Air Force One, sworn in by a woman judge?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in by Judge Sarah T. Hughes on the plane at Love Field in Dallas, on the afternoon Kennedy was shot; no president before or since has taken the oath on an aircraft.
Q 09Which president was the last to wear facial hair in office?
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft's moustache left with him in 1913. The nearest thing since was the stubble Harry Truman grew on a Key West holiday after the 1948 election, which he called a 'Jeff Davis'.
Q 10Which president was the first to live in the White House?
John Adams
John Adams moved into its damp, unfinished rooms in November 1800, just before losing that year's election, so he lived there for only about four months.
Q 11Which inventor tried to locate the assassin's bullet inside a dying president in 1881 with a metal detector?
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell's detector worked in tests but found nothing: the chief doctor let him search only the side where he insisted the bullet lay, and by some accounts the metal bed frame upset the readings.
Q 12Which former president became the first to fly in an aeroplane, as a passenger at a St. Louis airfield?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt had left office the year before: in October 1910, while he was campaigning in Missouri, pilot Arch Hoxsey invited him up in a Wright biplane at Kinloch Field.
Q 13Which president, born in Kinderhook, New York, grew up speaking Dutch as his first language?
Q 21Which president became one of the Navy's youngest pilots in 1943 and was shot down over Chichijima a year later?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush bailed out over the ocean and was picked up by an American submarine. He flew 58 combat missions in the war and won the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Q 22Which president was sworn in by his own father, a notary public, by the light of a kerosene lamp?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge was visiting his father's Vermont farmhouse when word came in the night that Harding had died. He took the oath in the parlour, then went back to bed.
Q 23John Tyler was mocked as 'His Accidency' because he was the first to become president in what way?
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and the O.K. Clubs his supporters formed in 1840 probably helped spread 'OK', which began a year earlier as a joke abbreviation of 'oll korrect'.
Q 14Which president had electricity installed in the White House but feared touching the switches?
Benjamin Harrison
Benjamin Harrison's family so feared a shock that the electrician who wired the house in 1891 was kept on to work the switches for them. He stayed on the White House staff for 42 years.
Q 15What were John Adams's last words, on 4 July 1826?
Thomas Jefferson survives
'Thomas Jefferson survives' proved wrong: Jefferson died at Monticello that same day, about five hours before Adams, on the Declaration's 50th anniversary.
Q 16Which president is credited with inventing the swivel chair?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson's revolving Windsor chair was made in Philadelphia, probably to his own design, and by family account he used it while drafting the Declaration of Independence.
Q 17Which president operated a whiskey distillery at his estate to supplement his income?
George Washington
George Washington was talked into it by his Scottish farm manager in 1797. Two years later the stills turned out nearly 11,000 gallons, making the distillery one of the largest in the country.
Q 18Which president survived an 1835 assassination attempt at the Capitol when both pistols misfired?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson, then 67, set about gunman Richard Lawrence with his cane until bystanders wrestled the man down. Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Q 19Which president was born with the surname Blythe, three months after his father died in a car crash?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton took his stepfather Roger Clinton's surname in high school, even though Roger was an abusive alcoholic whose rages the boy often had to step in to stop.
Q 20Which president memorised lines by Emerson and Yeats to overcome a childhood stutter?
Joe Biden
Joe Biden won his Senate seat at 29, too young to take it until his 30th birthday came round. He then commuted home to Delaware by train for 36 years, which earned him the nickname 'Amtrak Joe'.
On a president's death
On a president's death, nobody was sure a vice president truly took over, so opponents wrote to 'Acting President Tyler'. He sent the letters back unopened, and his claim became the rule.
Q 24Which former president died in the Capitol in 1848, two days after collapsing on the House floor?
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams, 80 and in his seventeenth year in the House, had just voted 'no' in a debate when he collapsed at his desk. Colleagues carried him to the Speaker's Room, where he died.
Q 25What left Theodore Roosevelt nearly blind in his left eye while he was president?
A boxing injury
A boxing injury: a young artillery captain caught him on the eye during a White House sparring bout. Roosevelt kept it quiet for years, gave up boxing and took up jiu-jitsu instead.
Q 26Which president was called 'His Fraudulency' after a commission awarded him 20 disputed electoral votes?
Rutherford B. Hayes
Rutherford B. Hayes went to bed on election night sure he had lost to Samuel Tilden, who led the popular vote. The commission's ruling then made him president by 185 electoral votes to 184.
Q 27Which president was the third to die on the Fourth of July, five years after two of his predecessors?
James Monroe
James Monroe left the presidency deep in debt and, after his wife died, moved to New York City to live with his daughter. He died there on 4 July 1831.
Q 28Which material, rather than the wood of legend, went into George Washington's false teeth?
Ivory
Ivory, human and animal teeth and metal fittings made up his dentures. He had one tooth of his own left when he became president, and his dentist was later allowed to keep it as a memento.
Q 29Which president was born with his first and middle names in the opposite order from the one we know?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower was born David Dwight, sharing a first name with his father, David. To save confusion the family called him Dwight, and the two names were switched round.
Q 30Which president is the only Eagle Scout to have held the office?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford earned the rank as a Michigan teenager in the 1920s. When he died, his family asked for Scouts at the funeral, and Eagle Scouts lined the route of the procession in his honour.