80 free Tennessee trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 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 80 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tennessee joined the Union on June 1, 1796. Which number state was it?
16th
It was the first state carved out of federal territory rather than one of the original colonies. Kentucky, admitted four years earlier, was still part of Virginia's claim.
Q 02Tennessee earned its Volunteer State nickname for the men who signed up to fight in which conflict?
The War of 1812
The reputation was cemented again in 1846, when a call for 2,800 volunteers for the Mexican War drew about 30,000.
Q 03The state's name comes from Tanasi, a town belonging to which Native American nation?
Cherokee
The spelling settled on 'Tennessee' after Governor James Glen of South Carolina used it in official correspondence in the 1750s.
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 started it as a social club; 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
The would-be 14th state got seven votes in Congress in 1785, short of the two-thirds required, and collapsed by 1789.
Q 09Whose note made Tennessee legislator Harry Burn switch to 'yes' on the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920?
His mother
Febb Burn's letter told him to 'be a good boy' and vote for suffrage. Supporters wore yellow roses, opponents red, so the fight is remembered as the War of the Roses.
Q 10The 1925 Scopes 'Monkey Trial' over the teaching of evolution was held in which Tennessee town?
Dayton
Town boosters engineered the case to put the place on the map, and it worked: hundreds of reporters and a live radio hookup descended on a town of 1,800.
Q 11John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined how much?
$100
The verdict was later overturned on a technicality: the judge, not the jury, had set the fine. William Jennings Bryan died five days after the trial ended.
Q 12The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in May 1933 as part of which president's New Deal program?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
TVA built 20 hydroelectric dams between 1933 and 1951 and remains the largest public utility in the country.
Q 13Which state did George W. Norris, namesake of TVA's first project Norris Dam, represent in the Senate?
Nebraska
Norris had fought for a decade to keep the federal Muscle Shoals dam out of private hands before FDR embraced the idea.
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
Performers still stand on that circle, so every Opry debut technically happens 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 built the Union Gospel Tabernacle after being converted at a tent revival; the pews are still the seating today.
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
It was the largest industrial spill in US history by volume, covering 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
The 'Secret City' did not appear on maps, yet by 1945 it was the fifth-largest city in the state.
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
It is only the second element named after a US state; californium came first in 1950.
Q 18The Grand Ole Opry began in November 1925 as a barn dance on which Nashville radio station?
WSM
The call letters stood for the slogan of the station's owner, National Life and Accident Insurance: 'We Shield Millions.'
Q 19George D. Hay coined the Opry's name in 1927 by contrasting it with the preceding program. What music was that?
Grand opera
Hay's line was: 'For the past hour, we have been listening to music largely from Grand Opera, but from now on, we will present The Grand Ole Opry.'
Q 20What distinction does the Grand Ole Opry, on the air since 1925, hold in American media?
Longest-running radio broadcast in US history
Its first performer was 77-year-old fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson, who reportedly complained an hour was not long enough to warm up.
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
Sculptor Alan LeQuire finished her in 1990; she was covered in more than eight pounds of gold leaf in 2002.
Q 25Nashville was chartered in 1784 and named for Francis Nash. Who was he?
A Revolutionary War general
Nash was mortally wounded at Germantown in 1777; the settlement had started five years earlier as Fort Nashborough.
Q 26In 1963 Nashville merged its city government with which county?
Davidson
The move made Nashville the largest city in the state by land area overnight.
Q 27The 1960 downtown Nashville sit-in campaign targeted what?
Segregated lunch counters
It ran from February to May and made the city the first major Southern city to desegregate its counters.
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 revenge backfired: he loved it, and by the mid-1930s the Prince brothers had opened the BBQ Chicken Shack, ancestor of today's Prince's.
Q 29Nashville hot chicken is traditionally served on top of what?
White bread with pickle chips
The heat comes from a paste of lard and cayenne, roughly three parts to one, brushed on after frying. 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
Visitors can buy commemorative bottles at the distillery under a special exemption, but no bar in the county can pour a Jack and Coke.