50 free Wilmington NC trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
40 free Wilmington NC trivia questions with answers. Wilmington NC trivia for locals, UNCW students, transplants and anyone who has walked the riverwalk. The quiz runs from the town's 1739 founding and the world's longest railroad, through Fort Fisher and the fall of the last Confederate port, the 1898 coup, the WWII shipyard and the Battleship North Carolina, to the modern city: Michael Jordan's Laney High years, Dino De Laurentiis's studio and the shows it made ('Hollywood East'), the Azalea Festival, Airlie Gardens, the Bellamy Mansion, Thalian Hall, Hurricane Florence, the Seahawks and the Venus flytrap that grows nowhere else on earth. Easy questions any resident will get come first; later ones will test a Cape Fear historian. It works as a trivia-night round downtown or a family game on the way to Wrightsville Beach. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and carries its source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Wilmington sits on which North Carolina river?
Cape Fear
The 191-mile blackwater river reaches the Atlantic just below the city; Wilmington's downtown riverwalk runs 1.75 miles along it.
Q 02Wilmington is the county seat of which county?
New Hanover
The 2020 census counted 115,451 residents in the city itself.
Q 03The city was named in 1739 for Spencer Compton, who held what title?
An earldom
He was the 1st Earl of Wilmington; Colonel William Bartram, uncle of the naturalist, introduced the bill and named the town for his patron.
Q 04What is Wilmington's nickname?
The Port City
It has been a seaport since colonial days and remains North Carolina's largest.
Q 05The Wilmington and Weldon, completed in 1840, held what world record?
Longest single rail line
At 161.5 miles it beat anything else on earth; it later became part of the Atlantic Coast Line and carried Confederate supplies in the war.
Q 06Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city until which city overtook it in 1910?
Charlotte
Toward the end of the 19th century it was the state's most populous city and a majority-Black one, which is central to the story of 1898.
Q 07The events of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington are described as the only what in United States history?
A successful coup d'etat
A mob of 2,000 white men overthrew the elected biracial Fusionist government and destroyed the state's only Black-owned daily newspaper.
Q 08How large was the mob that overthrew Wilmington's elected government in 1898?
About 2,000
At least 14 Black residents were killed and estimates run from 60 to more than 300; the city then had 11,324 Black and 8,731 white residents.
Q 09Fort Fisher, guarding the approach to Wilmington's port, was nicknamed the Southern what?
Gibraltar
Built mostly of soil, it absorbed heavy bombardment; it fell on January 15, 1865, and the city itself on February 22.
Q 10Why was the fall of Wilmington in February 1865 so damaging to the Confederacy?
It closed the South's last Atlantic port
Blockade runners had kept Lee's Army of Northern Virginia supplied through the port; Braxton Bragg abandoned the city at 1 a.m. on the 22nd.
Q 11What was the nickname of the WWII battleship now a memorial across from downtown?
Showboat
USS North Carolina (BB-55) earned 15 battle stars, more than any other US battleship in the war, and opened to visitors in April 1962.
Q 12How many main guns did the memorial battleship BB-55 carry?
Nine 16-inch
Three triple turrets; she was the lead ship of her class of fast battleships, commissioned in April 1941 and made a National Historic Landmark in 1982.
Q 13How many ships did the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company build in Wilmington between 1941 and 1946?
243
Employment peaked at 21,000 in 1943; the first Liberty ship, SS Zebulon B. Vance, was launched hours before Pearl Harbor.
Q 21Which Marvel film began shooting at Wilmington's studios in May 2012?
Iron Man 3
It went on to gross more than $1.2 billion worldwide.
Q 22David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) used Wilmington's studio and streets to play which fictional town?
Lumberton
Dino De Laurentiis financed it; Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper starred.
Q 23The North Carolina Azalea Festival has been held in Wilmington every April since which year?
1948
Dr. W. Houston Moore's idea now draws about 300,000 people; Ronald Reagan emceed in 1959 and Andy Griffith came the year before.
Q 14Which basketball legend grew up in Wilmington and was cut from his high school varsity as a sophomore?
Michael Jordan
He was 5 feet 11 at Laney High; he then hit the winning shot in the 1982 NCAA final and won six titles with the Bulls.
Q 15Which local high school did the future Bulls star attend?
Emsley A. Laney
Sonny Jurgensen, the Hall of Fame quarterback, went to New Hanover High a generation earlier.
Q 16Which Italian producer built Wilmington's film studio in 1984?
Dino De Laurentiis
His DEG lot passed to Carolco, then EUE/Screen Gems in 1996, and to Cinespace in 2023; more than 300 productions have shot there.
Q 17Wilmington's Cinespace studio is described as the largest film and TV production facility where?
Outside California
The city earned the nicknames 'Hollywood East' and 'Wilmywood'.
Q 18Stage 10 at the Wilmington studios, the third-largest US production stage when opened in 2009, is what size?
37,500 square feet
It is a columnless building; Iron Man 3 arrived to use it three years later.
Q 19Which teen drama, set in fictional Capeside, Massachusetts, was filmed in Wilmington from 1998 to 2003?
Dawson's Creek
Kevin Williamson's show launched James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams to Paula Cole's 'I Don't Want to Wait'.
Q 20Which series about half-brothers on a high-school basketball team was filmed in Wilmington?
One Tree Hill
Mark Schwahn's show ran from 2003 to 2012 on The WB and then The CW; the River Court is a real spot on the river.
Q 24Airlie Gardens, a 67-acre showpiece, was begun in 1886 by whom?
Sarah Green Jones
Sarah Green Jones laid it out; New Hanover County bought it in 1999 and its live oak, the Airlie Oak, is about 500 years old.
Q 25The Bellamy Mansion, built 1859-61 on Market Street, was used as what by Union forces in 1865?
Military headquarters
Dr. John Bellamy's Greek Revival-Italianate house was raised by enslaved and free Black artisans; its restored slave quarters are among the few open to the public.
Q 26Thalian Hall, the 1858 theatre, shares its building with what municipal institution?
The city government
The Thalian Association's grant funded the attached opera house when the city built its new hall in the 1850s.
Q 27Which carnivorous plant is native only to a roughly 60-mile radius of Wilmington?
The Venus flytrap
It became North Carolina's state carnivorous plant in 2005 and poaching one has been a felony since 2014.
Q 28What did North Carolina do in 2014 to protect its native carnivorous plant?
Made poaching it a felony
The trap fires only when two trigger hairs are touched within about 20 seconds, so raindrops do not fool it.
Q 29Hurricane Florence made landfall on September 14, 2018, just south of which town beside Wilmington?
Wrightsville
All roads into Wilmington flooded and the city was cut off; the storm set a state rainfall record of 35.93 inches near Elizabethtown.
Q 30How much rain fell on Wilmington from Hurricane Florence over September 13-16, 2018?
23.02 inches
Florence's crawl across the coast caused $24 billion in damage and 54 deaths.