Welcome to Day 4 of my July trivia posts.*
Trivia: All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.
Happy Independence Day! I’d like to have independence from blatantly wrong trivia. I didn’t even have to google this one (but I did.) I looked at the back of a five-dollar bill with a magnifying glass. There are twenty-six states listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial, not fifty.
And even weirder, there wasn’t space for all the states listed on the front of the actual memorial. So, it says Carolina for both North and South Carolina, and Hampshire for New Hampshire on the bill (look for yourself!)
I even looked at the rest of the back to make sure they hadn’t hidden other states. There were none.
This trivia is even less accurate than most trivia since there aren’t even fifty states on the top of the actual Lincoln Memorial. There are only forty-eight because it was built before Hawaii and Alaska were states. There is a plaque at the base that lists those two states.
The states are on all four sides of the memorial in two rows. The bottom row lists the states that were in the United States when Lincoln was president. The top row shows all forty-eight states. That means that some states are duplicated, but not on the same side. Since only the front is printed on the back of a five-dollar bill, it makes sense that only the states found on that side would be listed, thus twenty-six.
As I often ask, why print trivia that is so wrong and so easily disproved? Things like this can create chaos. Facts are important and accuracy should be spread. I hope you are sharing my corrections with your friends and family. It’s a patriotic thing to do.
I give this trivia a 0 out of 10. If I could give it negative points, I would, just because I didn’t even need the internet to disprove it.
*I’m doing something hard (for me) in July that I don’t want to talk about until August (in case I fail.) This something takes a lot of time, so I’m simplifying my July posts. I’m using a list of trivia that Aunt Patti emailed me. Each day, I will explore a trivia fact and bring you the truth, not just the clickbait. I might even rate the trivia. I think this will be fun because I love exploring new topics and sharing them with you. I hope you learn something too. If you do, why not share it with a friend. One of my goals is to get more readers, and word of mouth is a great way to do that. Many thanks.