US National Monuments
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50 free US National Monuments trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The United States has more than a hundred national monuments, and they are a stranger mix than the national parks: a copper statue in a harbor, a field of black lava, a single house in a small town, a stretch of open ocean bigger than most countries. A president can create one with a signature, which is why so many of them arrived with a political fight attached. This quiz covers the famous ones and the surprises: which landmark came first, which monuments later became national parks, where astronauts trained, which forts and battlefields made the list, and which sites honor civil rights history. You will also meet the people behind the names, from sculptors and explorers to the presidents who drew the boundaries. It is pitched for road-trippers, park-pass collectors, history buffs and anyone warming up for a pub quiz. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few stories worth retelling at the next visitor center.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which rock formation from the climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the first US national monument?
Devils Tower
Devils Tower was proclaimed the first national monument on September 24, 1906. Its name has no apostrophe because a geographic naming standard leaves them out.
Q 02Which former immigration station, once America's busiest, was added to Statue of Liberty National Monument in 1965?
Ellis Island
Ellis Island processed about 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. By one estimate, two-fifths of Americans may descend from someone who passed through it.
Q 03Which Baltimore landmark, whose 1814 defense inspired the US anthem, is the only National Monument and Historic Shrine?
Fort McHenry
Fort McHenry was a national park from 1925 until 1939, when it was given its unique double title. Francis Scott Key wrote the anthem's words after its flag survived a 25-hour British bombardment.
Q 04Which Cascade volcano's deadly 1980 eruption led Congress to create a National Volcanic Monument around it?
Mount St. Helens
Mount St. Helens killed 57 people and destroyed 200 homes when it erupted. The monument around it is run by the US Forest Service, not the National Park Service.
Q 05Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana marks the 1876 defeat of which US Army officer?
George Armstrong Custer
George Armstrong Custer died there along with every soldier of the five companies riding with him. The site was called Custer Battlefield National Monument until a 1991 law renamed it for the battle.
Q 06Which Arizona landmark was a national monument for eleven years before it became a national park in 1919?
Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon was proclaimed a national monument in 1908, and Congress upgraded it in 1919. A second monument of the same name was proclaimed to the west in 1932 and folded into the park in 1975.
Q 07The Aleutian Islands World War II National Monument covers Attu and Kiska, occupied in 1942 by which country?
Japan
Japan landed troops on Kiska and Attu in June 1942. It was the first time a foreign power had invaded and occupied the continental United States since the War of 1812.
Q 08Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine was created from land donated by a co-founder of which company?
Burt's Bees
Burt's Bees co-founder Roxanne Quimby gave the land, valued at $60 million, in 2016. She had wanted a national park, but switched to a monument after politicians opposed the idea.
Q 09Which president signed the 1906 law that created national monuments and proclaimed the very first one months later?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt signed the law on June 8, 1906, and used it for the first time that September. Congress had written it to protect Native American ruins from the collectors known as pot hunters.
Q 10Which California park, home to North America's lowest point, spent 61 years as a national monument first?
Death Valley
Death Valley was proclaimed a national monument by Herbert Hoover in 1933 and only became a national park in 1994. Its Badwater Basin lies 282 feet below sea level.
Q 11Which New York City national monument, designated in 2016, was the first dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history?
Stonewall
Stonewall National Monument covers the Stonewall Inn and tiny Christopher Park in Greenwich Village. A police raid on the bar on June 28, 1969, set off the riots widely seen as the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
Q 12Which redwood grove near San Francisco became a national monument in 1908 after William Kent donated the land?
Muir Woods
Muir Woods got its name because William Kent insisted the monument honor the naturalist John Muir. Kent had bought the canyon in 1905 to stop logging, then gave it away when a water company moved to dam its creek.
Q 13Carrizo Plain National Monument in California is an easy place to see surface fractures of which fault?
Q 21Craters of the Moon National Monument, where Apollo astronauts trained to collect rocks, lies in which state?
Idaho
Idaho is where Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, Eugene Cernan and Joe Engle practised picking out good rock specimens on a lava field. The Apollo missions later showed the real Moon looks little like it.
Q 22Dinosaur National Monument, famous for its Wall of Bones, straddles the border of Utah and which other state?
Colorado
Colorado holds most of the monument, though the fossil quarry itself is on the Utah side. The Wall of Bones is a steeply tilted rock layer studded with thousands of dinosaur fossils.
Q 23Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona lies within the boundaries of which Native American nation?
Navajo
San Andreas
San Andreas Fault movement has shifted the bed of Wallace Creek, which crosses it at right angles, by 425 feet. Geologists used the creek to work out the first slip rate measured along the fault.
Q 14Which abolitionist born enslaved in Maryland was honored there in 2013 with an Underground Railroad national monument?
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Dorchester County, where the monument was created on March 25, 2013. Congress later folded it into a national historical park that has a sister park in New York.
Q 15Whose 1955 murder in Mississippi is remembered, with his mother's activism, by a national monument created in 2023?
Emmett Till
Emmett Till was 14 when he was abducted and lynched. The monument, covering a Chicago church and two Mississippi sites, was established on what would have been his 82nd birthday.
Q 16The Washington Monument was the world's tallest structure from 1884 until which landmark overtook it in 1889?
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower took the record when it was completed in Paris. Despite its name, the 555-foot obelisk is officially a national memorial, and its marble changes shade a third of the way up because the quarry changed.
Q 17At the cottage now protected as President Lincoln and Soldiers' Home National Monument, Lincoln drafted which document?
Emancipation Proclamation
The Emancipation Proclamation took shape in a preliminary draft during Lincoln's first summer at the cottage, in 1862. He lived there from June to November in 1862, 1863 and 1864.
Q 18Which 1906 law lets US presidents proclaim national monuments on federal land without waiting for Congress?
Antiquities Act
The Antiquities Act has been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court, which ruled that it gives presidents wide discretion over what to protect and how large an area to reserve.
Q 19Which New Mexico national monument, surrounded by a missile range, was upgraded to a national park in 2019?
White Sands
White Sands protects the largest gypsum dunefield on Earth, holding about 4.5 billion tons of gypsum sand. It had been a national monument since Herbert Hoover proclaimed it in 1933.
Q 20Scotts Bluff National Monument in Nebraska preserves a landmark that guided emigrants on which wagon route west?
Oregon Trail
The Oregon Trail at first passed south of the bluff, through Robidoux Pass. California Trail emigrants and Pony Express riders steered by the same landmark.
The Navajo Nation surrounds the monument, in the Four Corners region. The word Chelly is a Spanish borrowing of a Navajo term meaning rock canyon.
Q 24Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, the oldest masonry fort in the continental US, stands in which Florida city?
St. Augustine
St. Augustine's fort is built of coquina, a stone of bonded shells first laid in 1672. English cannonballs sank into the walls instead of shattering them.
Q 25Cabrillo National Monument marks where the first European expedition landed on the future US West Coast, in which city?
San Diego
San Diego Bay is where Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo came ashore on September 28, 1542. The monument sits at the tip of Point Loma, beside a lighthouse that closed in 1891 because fog kept hiding its light.
Q 26Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona became a release site in 1996 for which endangered bird?
California condor
The California condor, North America's largest land bird, was reintroduced there because the area is so remote and empty of people.
Q 27Which explorer carved his signature and the date in 1806 on Pompeys Pillar, now a national monument in Montana?
William Clark
William Clark signed the rock on July 25, 1806, while travelling down the Yellowstone River valley with Sacagawea and her son Pomp. Hundreds of later visitors carved their initials beside his.
Q 28Jewel Cave National Monument, named for the calcite crystals lining its walls, lies in the Black Hills of which state?
South Dakota
South Dakota's Jewel Cave has more than 220 miles of mapped passages, placing it among the longest caves on Earth. In 1908 it became the first national monument created to protect a cave.
Q 29George Washington Carver National Monument, the first dedicated to an African American, is in which state?
Missouri
Missouri's Newton County holds the monument, two miles west of the town of Diamond. Franklin Roosevelt approved it in July 1943, six months after Carver died.
Q 30Which sculptor oversaw the carving of Mount Rushmore National Memorial between 1927 and 1941?
Gutzon Borglum
Gutzon Borglum argued the sculpture should be national in scope rather than regional, and convinced its backers to choose four presidents. His son, named Lincoln, helped him carry out the work.