Wilmington NC Trivia
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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
Cape Fear: Wilmington stands about 30 miles up the river from the open sea, yet it grew into North Carolina's chief seaport.
Q 02Wilmington is the county seat of which county?
New Hanover
New Hanover: the county dates from 1729 and honours the House of Hanover, the German dynasty that had inherited the British throne fifteen years earlier.
Q 03Wilmington is named for Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington, who went on to hold which British office in 1742?
Prime minister
Prime minister: Compton, a patron of the colony's governor Gabriel Johnston, followed Robert Walpole and is counted as Britain's second holder of the office.
Q 04The woman in which famous American painting was born in Wilmington in 1804?
Whistler's Mother
Whistler's Mother: Anna McNeill Whistler was born at Fourth and Orange Streets, and the portrait her son painted in London was later bought by the French government.
Q 05The railroad from Wilmington to Weldon, completed in 1840, held what world record?
Longest single rail line
Longest single rail line: about 161 miles of track, it was meant to run to Raleigh until the capital's citizens declined to buy enough shares.
Q 06Wilmington was North Carolina's largest city until which city overtook it in 1910?
Charlotte
Charlotte: Wilmington had been the state's biggest city, and a majority-Black one, until many Black residents were driven out in 1898 and its lead was gone by the 1910 census.
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 successful coup d'etat: an armed white mob burned the Black-owned Daily Record, forced the elected mayor and aldermen to resign, and made its own leader mayor the same day.
Q 08Which armed horsemen, named for their clothing, rode to intimidate Black voters in North Carolina's 1898 election campaign?
Red Shirts
Red Shirts: they rode for the Democratic campaign, and two days after its victory as many as 2,000 white men marched through Wilmington.
Q 09Fort Fisher, the Confederate stronghold near Wilmington, was nicknamed the Southern what?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar: the walls were heaped earth and sand, which soaked up naval shellfire, and by 1865 it was the largest earthwork fort in the South.
Q 10Why was Fort Fisher's fall in January 1865 so damaging to the Confederacy?
It closed the South's last Atlantic port
It closed the South's last Atlantic port: blockade runners had kept Lee's army supplied through Wilmington, and the city itself fell to Union troops five weeks later.
Q 11What is the nickname of the battleship North Carolina, moored as a memorial opposite downtown Wilmington?
Showboat
Showboat: saved from the scrapyard in 1961, she was towed 30 miles upriver to Wilmington and rammed a floating restaurant on the way to her berth.
Q 12Whose small donations helped save the battleship North Carolina from the scrapyard?
Schoolchildren
Schoolchildren: pupils across the state were asked for ten cents each, and the Save Our Ship campaign raised more than $330,000 to move and berth her.
Q 13Over half the 243 vessels built at Wilmington's wartime shipyard were which mass-produced cargo ships?
Liberty ships
Q 21Which Marvel film began shooting at Wilmington's studios in May 2012?
Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3: North Carolina's 25 percent film incentive helped lure Marvel from California, and the finished film took more than $1.2 billion at cinemas around the world.
Q 22David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) used Wilmington's studio and streets to play which fictional town?
Lumberton
Lumberton: Lynch borrowed the name of a real North Carolina city, and accepted a smaller fee in exchange for the final cut of the film.
Q 23Wilmington's spring festival, first held in 1948, is named for which flowering shrub?
Azalea
Azalea: the first festival crowned a film actress as its queen, and screen stars and musicians have been among its honoured guests in the years since.
Liberty ships: the yard launched its first on December 6, 1941, hours before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and named many of them for famous North Carolinians.
Q 14Which basketball legend grew up in Wilmington and was cut from his high school varsity as a sophomore?
Michael Jordan
Michael Jordan: judged too short for varsity, he starred for the junior varsity instead, grew four inches over the summer and made the team the following year.
Q 15Which future Wimbledon champion moved to Wilmington as a teenager to train under local doctor Hubert Eaton?
Althea Gibson
Althea Gibson: she enrolled at the city's Williston high school while Eaton coached her, and graduated with its class of 1949.
Q 16Which Italian producer built Wilmington's film studio in 1984?
Dino De Laurentiis
Dino De Laurentiis: his 32-acre lot turned Wilmington into an unexpected centre of film and television, and it kept working under new owners after his company collapsed.
Q 17The Wilmington Ten, pardoned in 2012, had been convicted of what 1971 crime?
Firebombing a grocery store
Firebombing a grocery store: the ten spent years in prison for the 1971 blaze before a federal appeals court threw out the convictions in 1980 over an unfair trial.
Q 18Which British general based his army in Wilmington in April 1781 before marching north into Virginia?
Lord Cornwallis
Lord Cornwallis: bloodied at Guilford Courthouse, he regrouped in Wilmington for a few weeks, then set off on the march that ended in his surrender at Yorktown.
Q 19Which teen drama, set in fictional Capeside, Massachusetts, was filmed in Wilmington from 1998 to 2003?
Dawson's Creek
Dawson's Creek: the series turned its filming spots into tourist stops, and 25 years after its debut the local visitors' bureau was still publishing a tour of them.
Q 20Which series about half-brothers on a high-school basketball team was filmed in Wilmington?
One Tree Hill
One Tree Hill: set in a fictional North Carolina town, it ran for nine seasons from 2003 and changed network when The WB merged into The CW.
Q 24In 1765 Wilmington saw the American colonies' first armed resistance to which British tax law?
The Stamp Act
The Stamp Act: a crowd forced the colony's stamp master to resign on the spot, and the governor ended up keeping the stamps aboard the ship that had brought them.
Q 25The Bellamy Mansion, built 1859-61 on Market Street, was used as what by Union forces in 1865?
Military headquarters
Military headquarters: Union officers moved into a house finished four years earlier by enslaved and free Black craftsmen, one of whom had already escaped to join the Union Navy.
Q 26Thalian Hall, Wilmington's 1858 theatre, shares its building with what?
The city government
The city government: the 1850s building put the town's offices, a library and an opera house under one roof, and an amateur drama society, the Thalian Association, ran the stage at first.
Q 27Which carnivorous plant grows wild only in the coastal bogs and savannas around Wilmington?
The Venus flytrap
The Venus flytrap: its whole natural range is a patch of the Carolina coast, where sandy soil is so poor in nutrients that trapping insects pays.
Q 28What did North Carolina do in 2014 to protect its native carnivorous plant?
Made poaching it a felony
Made poaching it a felony: until then it was a misdemeanor that usually ended in a small fine or court costs, which one conservationist called a slap on the wrist.
Q 29Hurricane Florence made landfall on September 14, 2018, just south of which beach town near Wilmington?
Wrightsville Beach
Wrightsville Beach: the storm lingered for two days of record rain, and floodwater closed the roads until Wilmington was cut off from the rest of the mainland.
Q 30Which future US president lived in Wilmington in the 1870s, when his father was pastor of First Presbyterian Church?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson: he arrived in 1874 after leaving Davidson College and spent the next year studying at home before going north to Princeton.