Oregon Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
8correct to beat the crowd
100 free Oregon trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free Oregon trivia questions with answers. Oregon is a state of superlatives and oddities: the deepest lake in America, the largest living organism on Earth, the first bottle bill, no sales tax, and a name nobody can agree on the origin of. This quiz covers the geography (Crater Lake, Mount Hood, Hells Canyon, the Columbia and the coast), the history (Lewis and Clark, Astoria, the Oregon Trail, statehood in 1859, the balloon bomb of 1945), the cities and companies (Portland, Salem, Eugene, Nike, Intel, Powell's), the culture (The Simpsons, The Goonies, Ken Kesey, Beverly Cleary, Steve Prefontaine, the Trail Blazers) and the laws and quirks that make Oregonians proud. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for anyone who has driven I-5; the rest climb steadily to details that will test lifelong residents. It works as a solo test or a ready-made Pacific Northwest round for a quiz night. Every answer has been checked against a reference source and each question shows its citation.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Oregon?
Salem
Salem has had to rebuild its capitol twice: fires destroyed the statehouse in 1855 and again in 1935, and the present marble building was finished in 1938.
Q 02Oregon became the 33rd state in 1859 on which holiday?
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day 1859 ended a long wait: Oregonians had ratified their state constitution in November 1857, fifteen months before Congress admitted them.
Q 03Which river forms most of Oregon's eastern border with Idaho?
The Snake
The Snake marks the Idaho line for more than 200 miles, and in 1805 Lewis and Clark became the first outsiders known to see it on their way to the Pacific.
Q 04Which Cascade volcano is the highest point in Oregon?
Mount Hood
Mount Hood has a film credit too: Timberline Lodge, high on its slopes, supplied the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.
Q 05Which lake, the deepest in the United States, lies at the heart of Oregon's only national park?
Crater Lake
Crater Lake has no rivers flowing in or out: it is filled only by rain and snow, which helps make its water some of the clearest of any lake.
Q 06Which volcano's collapse about 7,700 years ago created the centrepiece of Oregon's only national park?
Mount Mazama
Mount Mazama emptied itself in a huge eruption and fell in; later eruptions inside the hollow built Wizard Island before rain and snow filled it.
Q 07Which organism beneath a national forest in Oregon's Blue Mountains is often called the largest living thing on Earth?
A honey fungus
A honey fungus nicknamed the Humongous Fungus lies mostly out of sight: it creeps through the soil along black, shoestring-like cords and kills the conifers it feeds on.
Q 08Which sportswear giant, headquartered near Beaverton, is Oregon's largest public company?
Nike
Nike's swoosh was drawn in 1971 by Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student at a nearby university, who wanted a mark that suggested motion.
Q 09Under what name did Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman found their Oregon shoe company in 1964?
Blue Ribbon Sports
Blue Ribbon Sports began by importing Japanese running shoes, which Knight sold at track meets from the boot of his car.
Q 10Oregon is one of only five states without which tax?
Sales tax
Sales tax has gone to Oregon's voters nine times and lost every time, most recently in 1993, when three in four voted no.
Q 11Oregon's 'kicker' law returns money to taxpayers when what happens?
Tax revenue beats its forecast
Tax revenue beats its forecast by more than 2 percent and the whole amount above the forecast goes back to taxpayers; voters wrote the rule into the constitution in 2000.
Q 12In 1971 Oregon passed the first US law of its kind requiring a deposit on what?
Beverage containers
Beverage containers were targeted because they littered Oregon's beaches and highways; nine other states and most Canadian provinces later passed similar deposit laws.
Q 13Oregon was the first US state to legalise what, in 1994?
Physician-assisted suicide
Q 21Which city in Oregon, a centre of craft brewing, once had a brewer offer to pump free beer through its new fountain?
Portland
Portland turned Henry Weinhard down when he made the offer for the dedication of the Skidmore Fountain, which survives as the city's oldest piece of public art.
Q 22Which nickname did Oregon's largest city earn in the 1800s as land was cleared in a hurry for new streets?
Stumptown
Stumptown grew so fast after 1847 that felled trees' stumps were simply left standing in the streets until someone could be spared to pull them out.
Q 23Which town near the Columbia's mouth was the first permanent American settlement west of the Rockies?
Astoria
Physician-assisted suicide arrived with the Death with Dignity Act; Oregon voters refused to repeal it in 1997, and the US Supreme Court sided with the state in 2006.
Q 14Until August 2023, what did Oregon law forbid drivers to do at a petrol station?
Pump their own gas
Pump their own gas: the 1951 law gave 17 reasons for the ban, from fire risk to protecting attendants' jobs, and it lasted 72 years.
Q 15From 2018, Oregon charged a flat $15 excise tax on which purchase?
New bicycles
New bicycles priced at $200 or more carry the tax, and the money is earmarked for grants to cycling and walking projects.
Q 16What did Oregon's 1967 Beach Bill guarantee along the state's whole coastline?
Public access to every beach
Public access to every beach became law after a Cannon Beach motel owner fenced off the dry sand for his guests and Governor Tom McCall took up the fight.
Q 17Which Oregon-born cartoonist named characters Flanders, Lovejoy and Quimby after streets in his home city?
Matt Groening
Matt Groening also named Homer, Marge, Lisa and Maggie after his own father, mother and sisters, and made Bart an anagram of 'brat'.
Q 18Which 1985 adventure film about treasure-hunting kids was shot on Oregon's north coast?
The Goonies
The Goonies made its filming town a place of pilgrimage: the old county jail from the opening scene now houses the Oregon Film Museum.
Q 19Bend, Oregon, is home to the last remaining store of which once-huge video rental chain?
Blockbuster
Blockbuster's last outpost began in 1992 as an independent shop called Pacific Video, joined the chain in 2000, and has outlived every other branch in the world.
Q 20Which Oregon bookstore claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world?
Powell's
Powell's began in 1971 when Walter Powell copied his son's Chicago bookshop; its flagship now fills an entire city block with more than a million books.
Astoria began in 1811 as a fur post of John Jacob Astor's company, but within two years it was sold to a British rival and renamed Fort George.
Q 24Which town at the end of the Oregon Trail served as the territory's first capital?
Oregon City
Oregon City once mattered so much on the West Coast that San Francisco's original town plat was filed there, and a local museum still holds it.
Q 25Where did Lewis and Clark spend the winter of 1805-06, near the mouth of the Columbia?
Fort Clatsop
Fort Clatsop rotted away long ago; a 1955 replica burned down weeks before the 2005 bicentennial, and hundreds of volunteers then built the present one.
Q 26Which slogan demanded the whole Oregon Country for the United States before an 1846 treaty settled on the 49th parallel?
Fifty-Four Forty or Fight
Fifty-Four Forty or Fight named latitude 54°40′, the border expansionists wanted, but President Polk accepted the 49th parallel instead of a war with Britain.
Q 27What killed six picnickers near Bly, Oregon, in 1945, the only wartime deaths from enemy attack on the US mainland?
A Japanese balloon bomb
A Japanese balloon bomb had drifted across the Pacific on high winds; a pastor's wife and five children from his Sunday school found it in the woods, and it went off.
Q 28Oregon's provisional government banned slavery in 1844 and, in the same law, barred which group from settling?
African Americans
African Americans were shut out again by laws of 1849 and 1857, and the last of these exclusion laws was not repealed until 1926.
Q 29Which guru's followers built a city on an Oregon ranch in the 1980s and poisoned salad bars with salmonella?
The Rajneeshees
The Rajneeshees wanted to win a county election by making voters in The Dalles too ill to turn out; 751 people fell sick, though nobody died.
Q 30Which unidentified hijacker boarded a Boeing 727 in Oregon in November 1971 and parachuted out with $200,000?
D. B. Cooper
D. B. Cooper is a reporter's mistake: the man bought his ticket as 'Dan Cooper', and the wrong initials stuck once other news outlets repeated them.