Q 01/05

Which animals grazed on Boston Common from the 1630s until Mayor Harrison Gray Otis formally banned them in 1830?

A) Sheep

B) Cows

C) Goats

D) Pigs

Answer · why

B) Cows

Cows were the reason the Common existed: it began as shared pasture, and overgrazing forced a limit of 70 at a time as early as 1646.

Q 02/05

Park Street and Boylston stations, at two corners of Boston Common, opened in 1897 as part of America's first what?

A) Monorail

B) Funicular

C) Cable car

D) Subway

Answer · why

D) Subway

Subway tunnels dug beside the park in the 1890s also turned up forgotten graves, which were reburied together in the Central Burying Ground.

Q 03/05

Which Canadian province sends Boston a Christmas tree for Boston Common each year in thanks for 1917 disaster relief?

A) Nova Scotia

B) New Brunswick

C) Ontario

D) Newfoundland

Answer · why

A) Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia has sent the tree every year since 1971, repaying Boston for the relief train it rushed north through a blizzard after the Halifax Explosi...

Q 04/05

A stone monument on Boston Common honors the Oneida club of 1862, the first organized American team in which sport?

A) Baseball

B) Lacrosse

C) Football

D) Rowing

Answer · why

C) Football

Football as the Oneidas played it, the so-called Boston game, mixed kicking and carrying years before any formal rules, and later took hold at Harvard...

Q 05/05

Which American writer mocked Emerson and the Transcendentalists as Frog-Pondians, after the pond on Boston Common?

A) Mark Twain

B) Herman Melville

C) Edgar Allan Poe

D) Nathaniel Hawthorne

Answer · why

C) Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston yet feuded with its literary set, dismissing their work as obscure for its own sake.