Providence
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48 free Providence trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Providence was founded in 1636 by a banished preacher who named it for God's merciful Providence, grew into a port at the head of Narragansett Bay, burned a British schooner a year before the Boston Tea Party and became, for a while, the jewelry capital of the world. Today it is New England's third-largest city, home to Brown, RISD and a summer ritual of bonfires on the river. These 48 questions cover the whole city: Roger Williams and the Massachusetts Bay exile, the Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket, King Philip's War, the Gaspee Affair, Rhode Island's first-to-renounce and last-to-ratify record, the 1938 hurricane, the Industrial National Bank Building, Westminster Arcade, the sunken submarine museum, Federal Hill and the Dominican community, Textron and Hasbro, WaterFire and PVDFest, the Athenæum and H. P. Lovecraft, the Big Blue Bug, the Grays and Babe Ruth, Rocky Marciano, the first X Games, T. F. Green and Kennedy Plaza. Easy questions stick to the founder and the landmarks; the hard tier asks about dates, populations and city trivia. Every answer is cited to a page we checked and comes with a short explanation that adds one more fact. Play it solo or print it for a New England trivia night.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who founded Providence in 1636?
Roger Williams
Roger Williams bought the land from the local sachems rather than claim it under a royal charter, and offered it as a shelter for people persecuted for their conscience.
Q 02Which greeting, called out to Providence's founder as he landed in 1636, became the city's motto?
What Cheer
What Cheer comes from 'What cheer, netop?' (netop meaning friend), the hail said to have met him at Slate Rock, which city workers accidentally demolished in 1877 with too much dynamite.
Q 03Providence sits at the head of which bay?
Narragansett Bay
Narragansett Bay made an inland town a seaport: from a wharf built in 1680, Providence merchants joined the triangular trade in molasses, rum and enslaved people.
Q 04Besides Boston, which New England city topped Providence in the 2020 census?
Worcester
Worcester counted 206,518 residents to Providence's 190,934 in 2020, yet at the 2000 census Providence had still been ahead, by fewer than a thousand people.
Q 05Which animated sitcom, created by a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, draws Providence's skyline behind its main characters' home?
Family Guy
Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane studied at RISD in Providence, so he set the show in a fictional Rhode Island town, Quahog, and drew three real downtown towers behind the Griffins' home.
Q 06Which two rivers meet to form the Providence River?
Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket
Moshassuck and Woonasquatucket waters meet downtown, where both rivers lay paved over for decades until the city uncovered and rerouted them in the 1990s.
Q 07From which colony was Providence's founder banished for sedition and heresy?
Massachusetts Bay
Massachusetts Bay's court banished him in 1635, and that January he fled Salem on foot through deep snow; the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit sheltered him until spring.
Q 08Providence was burned to the ground in March 1676 during which war?
King Philip's War
King Philip's War reached the town on March 29, 1676, and its founder, by then in his seventies and captain of the militia, watched his own house burn with the rest.
Q 09Which college moved to Providence from nearby Warren in 1770?
Brown University
Brown University was Rhode Island College until 1804: the trustees had voted that $5,000 would buy the right to name it, and merchant Nicholas Brown, class of 1786, paid up.
Q 10What was burned in the 1772 Gaspee Affair?
A British customs schooner
A British customs schooner, HMS Gaspee, ran aground chasing a suspected smuggler; Providence men rowed out after midnight, shot its commander and burned the ship, and no raider was ever punished.
Q 11In Providence's Old State House on May 4, 1776, Rhode Island renounced its allegiance to which monarch?
George III
George III was renounced by Rhode Island's General Assembly two months before the Declaration of Independence, and the state still marks May 4 as its own Independence Day.
Q 12Rhode Island was which of the Thirteen States to ratify the US Constitution?
Last
Last, and by just 34 votes to 32 on May 29, 1790: Providence had threatened to secede from Rhode Island and join the Union alone if the convention said no.
Q 13What became of Providence's 1652 law, often called America's first anti-slavery statute?
It was never enforced
Q 21Which Providence landmark is the oldest enclosed shopping mall in the US?
Westminster Arcade
Westminster Arcade went up in 1828 as a granite Greek temple of shops; teams of oxen dragged its massive columns to the site from a quarry in nearby Johnston.
Q 22What happened in 2007 to the Soviet submarine moored in Providence as a floating museum?
It sank
It sank at its pier when a nor'easter struck in April 2007; the submarine had earlier served as a floating vodka bar in Helsinki and as the set of the Harrison Ford film K-19: The Widowmaker.
Q 23Which Broadway showman, who wrote 'Over There' and 'Give My Regards to Broadway', was born in Providence in 1878?
George M. Cohan
It was never enforced, as far as historians can find: the rule bound only Providence and Warwick, and Rhode Island ships went on to dominate the North American slave trade.
Q 14What did 1960s trade magazines call Providence?
The jewelry capital of the world
The jewelry capital of the world grew from a 1790s shortcut: Nehemiah Dodge found a way to plate cheap metal with gold, and affordable jewelry for a mass market became the city's trade.
Q 15Which disaster flooded downtown Providence in 1938?
A hurricane
A hurricane in September 1938 drove a storm surge up the bay into the low-lying downtown; the Fox Point Hurricane Barrier, finished in 1966, was built to stop it happening again.
Q 16Which Providence mayor was twice forced from office by a felony conviction, in 1984 and again in 2002?
Buddy Cianci
Buddy Cianci first won City Hall in 1974 as the anti-corruption candidate, a former prosecutor on the state's strike force; he left it in 2002 for prison, convicted of racketeering conspiracy.
Q 17What did eight artists secretly build and use from 2003 to 2007 inside the Providence Place shopping mall?
An apartment
An apartment of 750 square feet, furnished with a couch, a television and a PlayStation, sat hidden in a gap in the mall's structure until security guards caught artist Michael Townsend there in 2007.
Q 18Which new wave band's founders met in Providence as students at the Rhode Island School of Design?
Talking Heads
Talking Heads grew out of the Artistics, the campus band of David Byrne and Chris Frantz; Tina Weymouth joined only after they failed to find a bassist, and taught herself the instrument.
Q 19Which type of restaurant began as a horse-drawn wagon feeding Providence night workers in 1872?
Diner
The diner: in 1872 Walter Scott parked a covered wagon outside the Providence Journal and sold sandwiches, pies and coffee to night workers, and imitators' wagons later settled down as diners.
Q 20Providence's tallest building, a 1928 Art Deco bank tower, is nicknamed after which comic-book hero?
Superman
Superman lends his name because the tower is said to resemble the Daily Planet building of the 1950s television series; its sole tenant, Bank of America, moved out in 2013.
George M. Cohan always insisted he was born on the Fourth of July, as befits the man billed as the Yankee Doodle Dandy, but his Providence baptismal record says July 3.
Q 24Which Hispanic group forms the largest share of Providence's population?
Dominican
Dominican Providence grew up around Fefa's Market, the bodega Josefina Rosario opened on Broad Street in 1960, remembered as the first in Rhode Island.
Q 25Which neighbourhood is Providence's "Little Italy"?
Federal Hill
Federal Hill greets visitors on Atwells Avenue with an arch hung with a giant pine cone, La Pigna, an Italian symbol of welcome that is often mistaken for a pineapple.
Q 26Which Fortune 500 conglomerate is headquartered in Providence?
Textron
Textron began as a small yarn maker that sewed parachutes in the Second World War, then pioneered the conglomerate by buying unrelated firms; today it builds Bell helicopters and Cessna aircraft.
Q 27Which neighbouring city was toy maker Hasbro's longtime headquarters through the 2010s?
Pawtucket
Pawtucket was Hasbro's home for decades: the Hassenfeld brothers started out in Providence in 1923 selling textile remnants, and in 2025 the company announced a move to Boston.
Q 28What is the art installation that lights more than 80 bonfires on Providence's downtown rivers called?
WaterFire
WaterFire began as a one-off: artist Barnaby Evans lit First Fire for the tenth anniversary of First Night Providence in 1994, and supporters persuaded him to make it a recurring installation.
Q 29Greater Providence has topped national counts of which kind of shop per person?
Doughnut shops
Doughnut shops: a 2010 market-research count put the Providence area first in the country, ahead of Boston, in a region where Dunkin', founded in nearby Quincy, dominates the trade.
Q 30Which Tony Award-winning theatre troupe is based in Providence?
Trinity Repertory
Trinity Repertory staged its first plays in 1964 in a Methodist church on Broad Street, won the 1981 Tony for regional theatre, and now fills a former vaudeville house downtown.