Q 01/05

Fort Brooke, the 1824 army post Tampa grew up around, stood at the mouth of which river?

A) Withlacoochee

B) Hillsborough

C) Caloosahatchee

D) Kissimmee

Answer · why

B) Hillsborough

Colonel George Mercer Brooke arrived with four companies of the 4th Infantry from Pensacola. The fort closed in 1883, just as the railroad arrived.

Q 02/05

The earliest written form of the city's name, in the memoirs of a shipwrecked Spaniard, was spelled how?

A) Tempa

B) Tampo

C) Tanpo

D) Tanpa

Answer · why

D) Tanpa

Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda spent years among Florida's native peoples in the 1500s. One theory links the name to a Calusa word; another to a Cree...

Q 03/05

Tampa is the third-most-populous city in Florida, behind which two?

A) Miami and Orlando

B) Jacksonville and Orlando

C) Miami and St. Petersburg

D) Jacksonville and Miami

Answer · why

D) Jacksonville and Miami

The 2020 census counted 403,364 people in the city proper, but the wider Tampa Bay metro of 3.4 million is Florida's second largest.

Q 04/05

Besides 'Cigar City', Tampa's best-known nickname is 'The Big' what?

A) Orange

B) Mango

C) Guava

D) Papaya

Answer · why

C) Guava

A local columnist coined it in the 1970s as a play on New York's Big Apple, and the name stuck to a fruit that grows wild around the bay.

Q 05/05

Henry B. Plant's 1891 railroad hotel is now the main building of which institution?

A) University of South Florida

B) Florida Southern College

C) University of Tampa

D) Hillsborough Community College

Answer · why

C) University of Tampa

Plant's railroad had reached the town only eight years earlier. The hotel cost more than $3 million, had 511 rooms and stretched a quarter of a mile.