Pennsylvania Trivia
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97 free Pennsylvania trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free Pennsylvania trivia questions with answers. Pennsylvania is where the Declaration and the Constitution were signed, where the Civil War turned at Gettysburg, where oil was first drilled and steel was king, and where a groundhog gets a global audience every February. This quiz covers the whole Keystone State: Penn's Woods and the Quakers, Philadelphia's firsts, Pittsburgh's three rivers and 446 bridges, Hershey and Heinz, the Amish of Lancaster County, Three Mile Island and the Johnstown Flood, plus Fred Rogers, Andy Warhol, Fallingwater and the Rocky Steps. The easy questions ask what the state's nickname is and who founded it. The hard ones want the depth of the Drake Well, why Heinz picked the number 57, which town Little League calls home and how many words Lincoln needed at Gettysburg. It suits a classroom, a family reunion or a pub quiz anywhere between Erie and Philly. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the state, its cities and its landmarks, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01What is Pennsylvania's best-known nickname, used since 1802?
The Keystone State
The Keystone State. At a victory rally in 1802 it was toasted as 'the keystone in the federal union', the wedge at the top of an arch that locks all the other stones in place.
Q 02Pennsylvania is named in honour of which relative of its founder, William Penn?
His father
His father. Charles II named the colony for Admiral Sir William Penn, to whose estate the Crown owed a large debt; the founder feared people would think he had named it after himself.
Q 03William Penn first proposed naming his colony after which part of Britain?
Wales
Wales. His 'New Wales' met objections, so he offered Sylvania, Latin for woodland, and the king put 'Penn' in front of it.
Q 04A partial meltdown in 1979 at which Pennsylvania nuclear plant was America's worst commercial reactor accident?
Three Mile Island
Three Mile Island. No one was hurt, but the timing was uncanny: The China Syndrome, a thriller about a cover-up at a nuclear plant, had opened in cinemas just twelve days earlier.
Q 05Pennsylvania's southern boundary with Maryland is famous under what name?
The Mason-Dixon Line
The Mason-Dixon Line. Two English astronomers surveyed it in the 1760s to end a long and sometimes violent border quarrel, and it later became shorthand for the divide between free and slave states.
Q 06Pennsylvania has no ocean coastline, so in 1792 it bought a triangle of land to gain a port on which Great Lake?
Lake Erie
Lake Erie. Several states had claimed the same wedge of shore; the federal government sold it to Pennsylvania, and the port city that grew there shares the lake's name.
Q 07Philadelphia's name is Greek for what?
Brotherly love
Brotherly love. William Penn, a Quaker who had been jailed for his beliefs, chose the name, Greek for loving and brother, for a city where no one would be persecuted for religion.
Q 08Philadelphia was the largest city in the United States until which city overtook it in 1790?
New York
New York. That same year the two cities traded places another way: the federal government left New York for Philadelphia, which stayed the national capital until 1800.
Q 09Which Philadelphia landmark was begun in 1732 as the Pennsylvania State House?
Independence Hall
Independence Hall. The colony's legislature lent out its Assembly Room, so both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and signed in a borrowed chamber.
Q 10The Liberty Bell was hidden under an Allentown church floor in 1777 for fear the British would do what?
Melt it down
Melt it down. With Philadelphia about to fall, its bells were carted away so they could not be recast as cannon, and this one spent the winter beneath Zion Reformed Church.
Q 11The University of Pennsylvania grew out of an academy proposed in 1749 by which signer of the Declaration of Independence?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin. He proposed the academy in a pamphlet and chaired its first trustees; the university's official birthday of 1740 belongs to a charity school whose building it took over.
Q 12Who became the first Pennsylvania-born US president in 1857, four years before Lincoln?
James Buchanan
James Buchanan. The only president who never married, he had his niece Harriet Lane serve as First Lady, and retired to Wheatland, his Lancaster home, as the Union came apart.
Q 13The Battle of Gettysburg ended with the failure of which Confederate assault?
Pickett's Charge
Q 21Before chocolate, Milton Hershey made his first fortune in Lancaster selling which sweet?
Caramels
Caramels. His fresh-milk recipe made the Lancaster Caramel Company a success, and in 1900 he sold it for $1 million to stake everything on chocolate.
Q 22Which Hershey chocolate, launched in 1907, followed Milton Hershey's 1900 milk chocolate bar?
Kisses
Kisses. Every one was wrapped in foil by hand until 1921, when a machine took over and added the little paper plume that marks the real thing.
Q 23Heinz sold more than 57 products in 1896, so why did Henry Heinz pick the slogan '57 Varieties'?
He simply liked the number
Pickett's Charge. Some 12,500 men walked across open fields into the Union guns and about half were killed, wounded or captured; where they briefly broke through is called the Confederacy's high-water mark.
Q 14Which Union general commanded the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg?
George Meade
George Meade. He had held the command for only three days, replacing Joseph Hooker on 28 June, and reached the battlefield after the first day's fighting was already over.
Q 15Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address to dedicate what?
A cemetery
A cemetery, for the Union dead. Edward Everett spoke for two hours before Lincoln's 270-odd words, and wrote next day wishing he had come as near the heart of the occasion in two hours as Lincoln had in two minutes.
Q 16Pittsburgh sits where which two rivers meet to form the Ohio?
Allegheny and Monongahela
Allegheny and Monongahela. Whoever held the point where they meet controlled the way west, which is why France and Britain each built a fort on it and fought a war over it in the 1750s.
Q 17A 2006 count gave Pittsburgh 446 bridges, three more than which famous canal city?
Venice
Venice. Author Bob Regan counted 446 for his book The Bridges of Pittsburgh against the 443 claimed by Venice's tourist board, though what counts as a bridge is still argued over.
Q 18Pittsburgh's Fort Pitt was built by the British from 1759 to replace which French fort?
Fort Duquesne
Fort Duquesne. The French wrecked it and fled as General John Forbes's army closed in; Forbes named the place for statesman William Pitt and, being a Scot, probably said it 'Pittsborough'.
Q 19Pittsburgh's KDKA launched in November 1920 by broadcasting what?
Election results
Election results. The launch was timed for polling day, so its listeners learned that Warren Harding had beaten James Cox before they could read it in the newspapers.
Q 20Which industrialist opened his first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works, near Pittsburgh in 1875?
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie. The Pennsylvania Railroad was his best customer, so he made a point of naming his first steel plant after its president, J. Edgar Thomson.
He simply liked the number. Struck by a shoe advert boasting 21 styles, he wanted a figure that would stick, and said 58 or 59 did not sound as strong; 5 and 7 are also said to have been his and his wife's lucky numbers.
Q 24Before ketchup, what was the first product Henry Heinz's company sold?
Horseradish
Horseradish. That first firm, set up at Sharpsburg in 1869, went bankrupt in 1875; the ketchup that made the name famous came a year later, from the business he rebuilt with his brother and a cousin.
Q 25The Amish church began with a 1693 split among Swiss Anabaptists led by whom?
Jakob Ammann
Jakob Ammann. He insisted that expelled members be shunned even at the dinner table, which other Swiss Anabaptists refused, and those who sided with him came to be called Amish.
Q 26The Amish set of church rules governing electricity, cars and dress is called what?
The Ordnung
The Ordnung. Mostly unwritten, it is set district by district, so one congregation may allow what its neighbour forbids, and members reaffirm it before communion twice a year.
Q 27The language spoken by the Pennsylvania Dutch is actually a dialect of what?
German
German. In older English 'Dutch' covered Germans as well as Netherlanders, so the label was accurate when the settlers arrived; they call their own tongue Deitsch.
Q 28Punxsutawney Phil emerges each Groundhog Day from his burrow at what location?
Gobbler's Knob
Gobbler's Knob. A newspaper editor talked a band of local groundhog hunters into trekking up the hill in 1887; today a top-hatted Inner Circle runs the ceremony there before dawn.
Q 29According to tradition, what does it mean if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow?
Six more weeks of winter
Six more weeks of winter. No shadow means an early spring, and his keepers insist he is never wrong: any miss is blamed on the Inner Circle president who 'translates' his Groundhogese.
Q 30Which city on the Susquehanna River has been Pennsylvania's state capital since 1812?
Harrisburg
Harrisburg. It grew from Harris's Ferry, a trader's river crossing set up about 1718, and has outranked far bigger Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as the seat of government ever since.