Tallahassee Trivia
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47 free Tallahassee trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tallahassee became Florida's capital in 1824 because it was roughly halfway between Pensacola and St. Augustine, and it has been quietly collecting odd facts ever since: the first Christmas in what is now the United States, a land grant to the Marquis de Lafayette, a nephew of Napoleon on a nearby plantation, the only Confederate capital east of the Mississippi never captured, and Florida's only recorded sub-zero temperature. This Tallahassee trivia quiz covers all of that plus the modern city: the 22-storey Capitol and the Old Capitol saved from the wrecking ball, Florida State and Florida A&M, Bobby Bowden and Doak Campbell Stadium, the Marching 100, the 1956 bus boycott, the canopy roads, and the six weeks in 2000 when the whole world watched. Easy questions cover what the name means and which universities call the city home. Harder ones ask which architect designed the New Capitol, which explorer wintered at Anhaica, which musician grew up performing in Frenchtown, and which movie monster was filmed at Wakulla Springs. It works for a local trivia night, a Florida history class or a FSU-versus-FAMU argument. Every answer has been checked against a source and each question shows its citation and a short explanation once you answer.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Where did Florida's government first meet in Tallahassee in 1824?
Log cabins
Log cabins. A proper capitol begun two years later was never finished, and from 1839 it gave way to the building that still stands in front of the modern tower.
Q 02Tallahassee was chosen as capital in 1824 for lying roughly midway between St. Augustine and which city?
Pensacola
Pensacola. Spain had run East and West Florida as separate colonies from those two towns, so when the United States merged them into one territory it laid out a new capital halfway between.
Q 03The name Tallahassee comes from a Muskogean word usually translated as what?
Old town
Old town. The Creek name is thought to join the words for a tribal town and for old; a Seminole town there seems to have borne it before the capital did, and some render it 'old fields'.
Q 04Which Spanish explorer's expedition wintered at Anhaica, in present-day Tallahassee, in 1539–40?
Hernando de Soto
Hernando de Soto. Proof came only in 1987, when a state archaeologist poking around a building site turned up a shard of early Spanish olive jar, and then chain mail and crossbow bolts.
Q 05A Spanish expedition's 1539 winter camp in Tallahassee is often called the first US site to celebrate what?
Christmas
Christmas. No chronicle of the expedition mentions it: the claim rests on the priests who travelled with the army, who would have said Mass that December.
Q 06Which Native people had their capital at Anhaica, on the site of modern Tallahassee?
The Apalachee
The Apalachee. Spanish explorers wrote their name on early maps of the country to the north, and it stuck to a mountain range hundreds of miles away: the Appalachians.
Q 07Which French hero of the American Revolution got 36 square miles from Congress, much of it now Tallahassee?
The Marquis de Lafayette
The Marquis de Lafayette. He had spent some $200,000 of his own money on the American cause and lost the rest in France's revolution, so in 1824 Congress repaid him in cash and a township of his choosing.
Q 08Achille Murat, who settled near Tallahassee in the 1820s, was a nephew of which European ruler?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte. The son of the emperor's sister turned frontier planter in Florida, and there he married a great-grandniece of George Washington.
Q 09What set Tallahassee apart from every other Confederate state capital east of the Mississippi during the Civil War?
It was never captured
It was never captured. Local militia turned back a Union march on the city a few miles away in March 1865, only weeks before the war ended.
Q 10Which small Civil War battle was fought south-east of Tallahassee in March 1865?
The Battle of Natural Bridge
The Battle of Natural Bridge. The defenders included teenage cadets from the local college that later grew into Florida State University.
Q 11What tops Florida's 22-storey New Capitol in Tallahassee?
An observation deck
An observation deck. The Capitol's own museum says townspeople asked for it: climbing to the cupola of the old dome for the view had been a local tradition since 1902.
Q 12Which architect of Washington's Kennedy Center designed Florida's New Capitol tower in Tallahassee?
Edward Durell Stone
Edward Durell Stone. His tower was the legislature's answer to a 1967 campaign to move the capital out of Tallahassee: the money for a new complex was voted five years later.
Q 13What did Florida's governor want done with Tallahassee's Old Capitol in 1978, once the new tower had opened?
Demolition
Q 21What are Florida State's colours?
Garnet and gold
Garnet and gold. By the university's account the garnet is a blend: its champion football teams of 1904 and 1905 wore purple, the students then voted for crimson, and the administration mixed the two.
Q 22Which coach arrived at Florida State in 1976 and had only one losing season in 34 years?
Bobby Bowden
Bobby Bowden. The one losing year was his first, with a team that had won four games in the three seasons before he came; he went on to 28 straight bowl appearances and two national titles.
Q 23Who was Doak Campbell, the man Florida State's football stadium is named after?
FSU's first president
Demolition. The House speaker agreed with him, but a citizens' campaign saved the building, and it reopened in 1982 as a museum, restored to the way it looked in 1902.
Q 14In the 1960s a movement tried to move Florida's capital to which city?
Orlando
Orlando. The 1967 push by a Miami senator failed, and instead frightened the legislature into building the new Capitol in Tallahassee, where a plaque credits him with provoking it.
Q 15Which document did a Union general read aloud from the steps of Tallahassee's Knott House on 20 May 1865?
The Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation. The reading told the enslaved people of north Florida they were free more than two years after Lincoln signed it, which is why 20 May is kept as Emancipation Day in Florida.
Q 16Florida State has the Seminoles, but what are the teams of Tallahassee's other university, Florida A&M, called?
The Rattlers
The Rattlers. One of them, Althea Gibson, was still a student on a sports scholarship there when she broke tennis's colour bar at the US national championships in 1950.
Q 17What is the name of Florida A&M's famous band?
The Marching 100
The Marching 100. France invited it to represent the United States in the Bastille Day parade of 1989, the bicentennial of the Revolution, and it has since marched in inaugural parades for two presidents.
Q 18Florida A&M opened in 1887 to train which profession?
Teachers
Teachers. It opened as the State Normal College for Colored Students with fifteen students and two instructors, and within four years had added farming and trades as the state's land-grant college for Black students.
Q 19For 42 years, from 1905 to 1947, Florida State was what kind of institution?
A women's college
A women's college. What ended it was the Second World War: so many returning veterans wanted places that men were sent to the Tallahassee campus in 1946, and it went coeducational the next year.
Q 20Which national laboratory has its headquarters at Florida State University in Tallahassee?
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. It is paid for by the National Science Foundation and the state together, and scientists from around the world are given time on its record-setting magnets free of charge.
FSU's first president. Doak Campbell took charge of the college in 1941 and was still in office when it became a university in 1947; the stadium that opened three years later took his name.
Q 24Florida State's 'war chant' and tomahawk chop were taken up in 1991 by fans of which baseball team?
Atlanta Braves
Atlanta Braves. The chant appears to have started by accident at a 1984 game against Auburn, when students kept up a tune after the university band had stopped playing it.
Q 25Tallahassee's 1956 bus boycott came soon after a more famous one started in which city?
Montgomery
Montgomery. In Tallahassee it was two Florida A&M students, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, who sat in the whites-only seats; early the next year the city dropped segregated seating from its bus franchise.
Q 26Which Tallahassee neighbourhood is often described as the oldest historically Black neighbourhood in Florida?
Frenchtown
Frenchtown. The name comes from settlers who arrived from France in the 1830s and mostly gave up and left; families freed from slavery made the district their own after the Civil War.
Q 27Which Nobel-winning physicist, who predicted antimatter, spent his last years as a professor in Tallahassee?
Paul Dirac
Paul Dirac. He retired from Cambridge in 1969, took a chair at Florida State and stayed until his death in 1984, walking to his office each day and swimming in nearby lakes in summer.
Q 28For six weeks in late 2000, Tallahassee was the centre of world attention because of what?
The presidential election recount
The presidential election recount. Florida's officials certified George W. Bush the winner by 537 votes out of six million, and the lawsuits ran on until the US Supreme Court stopped the counting.
Q 29What did a state convention meeting in Tallahassee's Capitol vote to do on 10 January 1861?
Secede from the Union
Secede from the Union. Four years later the same building was where Union troops ran up the Stars and Stripes to mark Florida's surrender.
Q 30Which moss-draped tree arches over Tallahassee's nine official canopy roads?
The Southern live oak
The Southern live oak. By the city's own account several of the roads began as footpaths between Native villages and were later the tracks along which planters hauled their cotton to market.