Tennessee
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129 free Tennessee trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
79 free Tennessee trivia questions with answers. Tennessee packs a lot into one long, thin state: the birthplace of country music and of rock and roll, the Secret City that enriched uranium for the atomic bomb, the deciding vote for women's suffrage, the most-visited national park in America and a whiskey distillery in a county where you cannot buy a drink. This quiz covers all of it, from statehood and the Civil War to hot chicken, MoonPies, the Grand Ole Opry, the Titans, the Vols and the strange stories behind Ruby Falls, Reelfoot Lake and the Peabody ducks. The questions start easy (which state shares the Smokies, which president lived at the Hermitage) and climb to genuinely hard ones about Oak Ridge, the State of Franklin and the Sultana disaster, so natives and visitors both get their moment. Every answer was checked against a documented source and the citation is shown under each explanation, so a family argument about whether the Volunteer State really borders eight others can be settled on the spot. Play it solo, use it as a Tennessee round for a trivia night, or hand it to the out-of-towners before a Nashville bachelorette weekend.
30 of 129 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, Tennessee became which number state?
16th
Tennessee was the 16th state, admitted June 1, 1796, and the first created from a federal territory, the Southwest Territory, rather than from an original colony's land.
Q 02Tennessee earned its Volunteer State nickname for the men who signed up to fight in which conflict?
The War of 1812
The War of 1812 gave Tennessee the nickname after thousands of its volunteers answered the call, fighting at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815.
Q 03The state's name comes from Tanasi, a town belonging to which Native American nation?
Cherokee
Tanasi was a Cherokee town on the Little Tennessee River; South Carolina governor James Glen's official correspondence in the 1750s helped fix the spelling 'Tennessee'.
Q 04How many other states border Tennessee, a total it ties with Missouri for the most?
8
Clockwise from the north: Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri.
Q 05What do the trio of white stars on Tennessee's flag represent?
Its three Grand Divisions
Designer LeRoy Reeves added the narrow blue bar at the fly end so the flag would not 'show too much crimson when hanging limp.'
Q 06In July 1866 Tennessee became the first former Confederate state to do what?
Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment
Six days later its elected members were readmitted to Congress, sparing the state the military Reconstruction imposed on the rest of the South.
Q 07The Ku Klux Klan was founded in December 1865 in which small Tennessee town?
Pulaski
Six Confederate veterans founded the Klan as a social club in Pulaski, Giles County, around Christmas 1865; within two years it had become a violent paramilitary group across the South.
Q 08Which Founding Father declined to back a breakaway East Tennessee state, being 'too little acquainted' with it?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, the breakaway State of Franklin's namesake, wrote in 1787 that he was 'too little acquainted' with it to help; its 1785 statehood bid won seven votes, short of two-thirds.
Q 09Whose note made Tennessee legislator Harry Burn switch to 'yes' on the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920?
His mother
His mother, Febb Burn, wrote telling him to 'be a good boy' and vote for suffrage; his switch made Tennessee the 36th state to ratify, completing the Nineteenth Amendment.
Q 10The 1925 Scopes 'Monkey Trial' over the teaching of evolution was held in which Tennessee town?
Dayton
Dayton's boosters engineered the test case to put their town of about 1,800 on the map; hundreds of reporters and a live WGN radio hookup followed.
Q 11John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined how much?
$100
Scopes was fined $100, the Butler Act's minimum; the Tennessee Supreme Court later threw out the verdict because the judge, not the jury, had set the fine.
Q 12The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in May 1933 as part of which president's New Deal program?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act on May 18, 1933, one of the first New Deal measures, to build dams, control floods and electrify the valley.
Q 13Which state did George W. Norris, namesake of TVA's first project Norris Dam, represent in the Senate?
Nebraska
George W. Norris, a progressive Republican senator from Nebraska, fought for a decade to keep the federal Muscle Shoals dam out of private hands before TVA adopted the plan in 1933.
Q 21When the Opry left the Ryman in 1974, what was cut from the old stage and inlaid into the new Opry House stage?
A six-foot circle of oak flooring
A six-foot circle of oak flooring from the Ryman stage was set into the new Opry House stage in 1974, so performers stand on the same boards Hank Williams played.
Q 22The Ryman Auditorium, later home of the Opry, was built in 1892 by a riverboat captain as what?
A gospel tabernacle
Thomas Ryman, a riverboat captain converted at a Sam Jones tent revival, built the Union Gospel Tabernacle in 1892; it was renamed for him after his death in 1904.
Q 23Nashville's full-scale replica of the Parthenon was originally built for which 1897 event?
Q 14In December 2008 an earthen dike failed at TVA's Kingston plant, releasing 1.1 billion gallons of what?
Coal ash slurry
Coal ash slurry, about 1.1 billion gallons of it, burst from a failed dike on December 22, 2008, covering some 300 acres and swamping homes along the Emory River.
Q 15Oak Ridge was built from scratch in 1942 for what purpose?
To enrich uranium for the atomic bomb
Oak Ridge was built to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb; its Y-12 and K-25 plants fed the Manhattan Project, and the unmapped 'Secret City' was Tennessee's fifth-largest city by 1945.
Q 16Oak Ridge grew from empty woods to roughly what population by 1945?
75,000
Most residents had no idea what they were building; the town had 17 cafeterias and consumed more electricity than New York City.
Q 17Which element, number 117, was named in 2016 for the state home to Oak Ridge National Laboratory?
Tennessine
Tennessine takes the halogen ending -ine as element 117 in group 17; it is the second element named for a US state, after californium in 1950.
Q 18The Grand Ole Opry began in November 1925 as a barn dance on which Nashville radio station?
WSM
WSM's call letters stood for the slogan of the station's owner, National Life and Accident Insurance: 'We Shield Millions'; the WSM Barn Dance first aired November 28, 1925.
Q 19Which Tennessean was the only senator from a seceding state to keep his seat in 1861?
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson, a Greeneville tailor turned senator, refused to follow Tennessee out of the Union in 1861; Lincoln made him military governor in 1862 and his running mate in 1864.
Q 20What distinction does the Grand Ole Opry hold in American broadcasting?
Longest-running radio broadcast in US history
It is the longest-running radio broadcast in US history, on the air weekly since November 28, 1925, when 77-year-old fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson opened the first barn dance.
The state's Centennial Exposition
The temporary plaster original proved so popular it was rebuilt in concrete between 1920 and 1931.
Q 24Roughly how tall is the gilded statue of Athena inside Nashville's Parthenon?
42 feet
Alan LeQuire's Athena stands 41 feet 10 inches, roughly 42 feet, on her pedestal; finished in 1990, she was gilded with more than eight pounds of gold leaf in 2002.
Q 25Francis Nash, for whom Nashville was named in 1784, was what?
A Revolutionary War general
Francis Nash was a Revolutionary War general, mortally wounded at Germantown in October 1777; the settlement had begun in 1779-80 as Fort Nashborough.
Q 26In 1963 Nashville merged its city government with which county?
Davidson
Nashville and Davidson County merged into a single Metropolitan Government on April 1, 1963, after a 1962 referendum, making the consolidated city the state's largest by land area.
Q 27The 1960 downtown Nashville sit-in campaign targeted what?
Segregated lunch counters
Students from Fisk and other Black colleges sat in at downtown lunch counters from February 13, 1960; six stores desegregated their counters on May 10 after a boycott and the bombing of lawyer Z. Alexander Looby's home.
Q 28Legend says hot chicken was born when a woman spiked Thornton Prince's chicken with pepper as revenge for what?
Staying out all night
The legend says Prince came home after staying out all night, and his scorned girlfriend doused his fried chicken with pepper; he loved it, and the family opened the BBQ Chicken Shack in the mid-1930s.
Q 29Nashville hot chicken is traditionally served on top of what?
White bread with pickle chips
Nashville hot chicken is served on slices of plain white bread, which soak up the cayenne-laced lard paste, topped with pickle chips; KFC took a version national in 2016.
Q 30What is ironic about Moore County, home of the Jack Daniel's distillery in Lynchburg?
Alcohol sales are prohibited there
Moore County is dry, so alcohol sales are prohibited there even as the distillery turns out millions of cases a year; a special state exemption lets visitors buy commemorative bottles on site.