Richmond, Virginia Trivia
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This Richmond VA trivia quiz has 89 free questions with answers and starts with William Byrd II laying out a town grid in 1737 and naming it after a bend in the Thames, then runs through Patrick Henry at St. John's Church, Jefferson's temple of a Capitol, the four years as capital of the Confederacy and the fire that took a quarter of the city as the Confederates left. It follows the city into the streetcar age, Jackson Ward's 'Wall Street of Black America', Maggie Walker's bank and the century-long argument over Monument Avenue that ended with only Arthur Ashe still standing. There is plenty for people who live here now: the only Class IV rapids running through an American city, Belle Isle and Maymont, Carytown and the Byrd Theatre, the Flying Squirrels and the Kickers, VCU's Final Four run, the Federal Reserve tower on the skyline, the Fortune 500 firms in the suburbs and the metal bands that came out of the fan district. Early questions suit newcomers and school groups; the last stretch will test lifelong Richmonders. Every answer was checked against a reference page and shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 89 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which planter commissioned the original town grid of Richmond in 1737?
William Byrd II
William Byrd II. On one 1733 journey he planned two towns at the falls of two rivers: this one on the James, and Petersburg on the Appomattox.
Q 02Richmond, Virginia, is thought to be named after an English town on which river?
The Thames
The Thames. By tradition, the town's founder thought the James at the falls looked like the view from Richmond Hill, high above the Thames west of London.
Q 03Where in Richmond did Patrick Henry deliver 'Give me liberty or give me death!' in 1775?
St. John's Church
St. John's Church. Nobody wrote the speech down: the text we quote was pieced together decades later by biographer William Wirt, from the memories of men who had heard it.
Q 04Richmond replaced which city as the capital of Virginia during the Revolutionary War?
Williamsburg
Williamsburg. Lawmakers moved upriver partly to be safer from British attack, yet within a year Benedict Arnold's raiders came up the James and set the new capital alight.
Q 05As minister to France, Jefferson modelled the Virginia State Capitol on which Roman temple?
The Maison Carrée at Nîmes
The Maison Carrée at Nîmes. After sending the plans home he visited Nîmes in 1787 and wrote of 'gazing whole hours' at the temple, 'like a lover at his mistress'.
Q 06In May 1861 the Confederate Congress voted to move its capital to Richmond from which city?
Montgomery
Montgomery. The move put the Confederate capital only about a hundred miles from Washington, and 'On to Richmond' became the Union's rallying cry for years.
Q 07Which Richmond ironworks made the armour plating for the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia?
Tredegar
Tredegar. When Richmond burned in April 1865, owner Joseph Anderson posted his armed workers' battalion around the works to keep the mob out, and it survived the fire.
Q 08Richmond's 1865 Evacuation Fire, lit by retreating Confederates, was finally put out by whom?
Union soldiers
Union soldiers. The mayor went out to surrender the burning city, and the troops who marched in to occupy the Confederate capital spent their first hours fighting its fires.
Q 09Which US president walked through Richmond's smoking ruins in April 1865, days after the Confederates abandoned it?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln. He came ashore with his son Tad on the boy's twelfth birthday, and freed people who recognised him crowded round as he walked to Jefferson Davis's house.
Q 10Three decades before Nat Turner, which enslaved blacksmith planned an 1800 uprising to seize Richmond?
Gabriel
Gabriel. Two enslaved men gave the plot away hours before a torrential rainstorm kept the rebels from gathering, and he and 25 others were hanged.
Q 11In 1888 Richmond became the first city with a large, successful network of what?
Electric streetcars
Electric streetcars. Dozens of earlier attempts had failed, but Frank Sprague's cars climbed Richmond's steep hills on overhead wires, and cities around the world copied the design.
Q 12Which Richmond neighbourhood was known as the 'Harlem of the South'?
Jackson Ward
Jackson Ward. Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday played the Hippodrome on Second Street, and in the 1950s a turnpike, now part of Interstate 95, was driven through the middle of the neighbourhood.
Q 13In 1903, Maggie L. Walker of Richmond became the first African American woman to do what?
Charter a bank
Q 21Belle Isle, now a park in the James River at Richmond, served as what during the Civil War?
A prison camp
A prison camp. The river made escape hard, so the Confederacy penned captured Union privates on the island with no barracks, only tents for some, through summer heat and winter frost.
Q 22Which Richmond estate did a Gilded Age couple will to the city as a park?
Maymont
Maymont. The estate was named for Sallie May Dooley, and she and her husband James willed all 100 acres to the people of Richmond; it passed to the city on her death in 1925.
Q 23The Richmond Flying Squirrels arrived in 2010 as the Double-A affiliate of which MLB club?
San Francisco Giants
Charter a bank. Her St. Luke Penny Savings Bank survived the Depression through mergers, and a century later its successor was the oldest continually Black-run bank in the country.
Q 14Which two US presidents are buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery?
Monroe and Tyler
Monroe and Tyler. Monroe died in New York City and lay there for 27 years before Virginia brought him home, to a cast-iron Gothic tomb that Richmonders call 'the Birdcage'.
Q 15Hollywood Cemetery, established in 1847, got its name from what?
An abundance of holly trees
An abundance of holly trees. Designer John Notman kept the site's hills, ravines and woods and wound the paths around them, so Richmonders came to stroll there as they would in a park.
Q 16In January 1935, Richmond was the first place where which drink went on sale in cans?
Beer
Beer. New Jersey brewer Krueger sent its first cans to Richmond as a trial, and the drinkers' warm reception there persuaded it to keep canning.
Q 17Which Richmond-born athlete won Wimbledon in 1975 by beating defending champion Jimmy Connors?
Arthur Ashe
Arthur Ashe. As a schoolboy he was shut out of Richmond's whites-only courts and tournaments; in 1996 the city put his statue on Monument Avenue, among its Confederate generals.
Q 18Which Richmond-born politician was the first African American elected governor of a US state?
Douglas Wilder
Douglas Wilder. The grandson of enslaved Virginians won the 1989 race by fewer than 7,000 votes out of almost 1.8 million, then came back at 73 to run Richmond as its mayor.
Q 19Edgar Allan Poe joined the staff of which Richmond magazine in 1835?
The Southern Literary Messenger
The Southern Literary Messenger. Its owner fired Poe within weeks, reportedly for drinking, took him back that autumn and had made him editor by December.
Q 20Richmond bills itself as the only US city with what feature of the James River running through it?
Class IV rapids
Class IV rapids. The James tumbles across the fall line in the middle of the city, so rafters and kayakers run Class III and IV whitewater within sight of the downtown skyline.
San Francisco Giants. The franchise moved from Connecticut after Richmond's Braves left for Georgia, and newspaper readers picked its name over Rock Hoppers, Rhinos and Hush Puppies.
Q 24Two years after forming, soccer's Richmond Kickers won which national trophy in 1995?
The U.S. Open Cup
The U.S. Open Cup. The Kickers were a fourth-tier side that year, yet they beat the El Paso Patriots on penalties in Texas to take the national knockout title.
Q 25Which head coach took VCU from the First Four to the Final Four of the 2011 NCAA tournament?
Shaka Smart
Shaka Smart. In only his second season, his eleventh-seeded Rams won five games in a row, the last over top-seeded Kansas, before losing the semi-final to Butler.
Q 26VCU was created in 1968 by merging the Richmond Professional Institute with what?
The Medical College of Virginia
The Medical College of Virginia. It began in 1838 as the medical department of Hampden-Sydney College, which is why VCU dates its founding 130 years before the merger.
Q 27In NASCAR terms, Richmond Raceway is which kind of venue?
A short track
A short track. At three-quarters of a mile it sits under NASCAR's one-mile line; it opened in 1946 as a half-mile dirt oval at the fairgrounds and was stretched in 1988.
Q 28Richmond's Virginia Museum of Fine Arts owns five of which Russian imperial treasures?
Fabergé eggs
Fabergé eggs. Lillian Thomas Pratt, urged on by the dealer Armand Hammer, collected the tsars' jewelled Easter gifts and willed all five to the young museum in 1947.
Q 29Richmond is one of the few US cities with both a US Court of Appeals and which other national institution?
A Federal Reserve Bank
A Federal Reserve Bank. Bigger Baltimore was in an uproar when Richmond was chosen in 1914, and Baltimore ended up with a branch office of the Richmond bank.
Q 30Richmond-based Reynolds Metals launched which kitchen staple in 1947?
Aluminium foil
Aluminium foil. Reynolds had rolled foil for packaging since 1926, and after the war began selling it by the roll to home cooks under the name Reynolds Wrap.