What were the 13 original colonies?

New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia — the British colonies that declared independence in 1776.

Why does the quiz use modern state borders?

It is the standard classroom convention. Actual colonial borders were larger and often disputed — Massachusetts included Maine, and Virginia's charter claims extended far west — but map quizzes use today's state shapes for clarity.

Which colonies are hardest to find on the map?

Delaware and Rhode Island, the two smallest, cause the most misses. Distinguishing North from South Carolina and remembering New Hampshire sits east of Vermont (which was not a colony) are the other common errors.

What are the 13 colonies in order from north to south?

New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia.

What are the three regions and which colonies are in each?

New England (4): New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut. Middle (4): New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware. Southern (5): Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia.

Which colony was founded first and which was last?

Virginia was first, at Jamestown in 1607. Georgia was last, chartered in 1732 and settled at Savannah in 1733.

Was Maine or Vermont one of the 13 colonies?

No. Maine was governed as part of Massachusetts until it became a state in 1820. Vermont was the disputed New Hampshire Grants and joined as the 14th state in 1791.

Do I need an account or a download to take the quiz?

No. It is free, runs in your browser, and needs no signup. Your best score is saved locally on your device.

13 Colonies Map Quiz - Free Interactive Test

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The 13 colonies map quiz tests whether you can place all thirteen original British colonies that declared independence in 1776 — the exam staple of every US history class. The map zooms into the eastern seaboard and shows the colonies at their modern state borders, so you are finding Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut in New England; New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware in the middle colonies; and Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia in the south. Two things trip students up every time: Delaware and Rhode Island are tiny targets that punish careless clicking, and the Carolinas plus Virginia–Maryland ordering along the coast takes a couple of rounds to lock in. Keep in mind the historical borders differed from today's — colonial Virginia and Georgia claimed land far beyond their modern outlines — but the modern-state convention is how every classroom quiz presents them. Click the named colony to score, learn from the reveals, and walk into your history test ready.

Historical note: this quiz uses modern state borders, the standard classroom convention. The actual colonial boundaries were larger and vaguer — Virginia's 1609 charter theoretically stretched to the Pacific, and Maine was then part of Massachusetts.

How to play

The quiz names one of the 13 colonies — find it and click it on the map.
A correct click locks in green. A wrong click flashes red, and after two misses the quiz highlights the answer for you.
You score a point for every first-try answer. Finish all 13, check your score, then replay — the order reshuffles every round.

There are 13 colonies, they split into three regions (4 New England, 4 Middle, 5 Southern), and most wrong clicks land on the same handful of small targets. This free interactive map quiz runs in your browser with no signup and no download: you get a colony name, you click it on the map, and your best score is saved on your own device. Below the quiz is the mnemonic that makes the order stick, the confusable pairs worth pre-loading before your first run, and the honest answer to why this map does not look like a 1775 map.

How to Memorize the 13 Colonies (Mnemonics That Actually Stick)

Do not try to memorize thirteen items. Memorize three chunks: four New England colonies, four Middle colonies, five Southern colonies. That 4-4-5 split is the scaffold everything else hangs on, and region confusion is the single most reported struggle in colonial-unit teaching guides, so getting it first pays twice. New England, north to south: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut. Middle, north to south: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware. Southern, north to south: Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia. Read that top to bottom and you have traced the Atlantic coast in one line from the Canadian border to Florida.

Now fix the order inside each chunk with an acronym. New England (Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode, Connecticut): "Hungry Moose Race Canoes." Middle (York, Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware): "Yaks Jump Past Dunes." Southern (Maryland, Virginia, North, South, Georgia): "My Very Nice Sister Grace." Three short sentences, thirteen colonies, exact north-to-south map order. If you have met the flashcard-era mnemonics, note that they are solving a different problem: "MR CaN" lists the New England four in no geographic order, and "Virginia Goes 2C Mary" collapses the two Carolinas into one item. Useful for a list, useless for a map, because a map quiz asks you to place a colony, not recite it.

If you also need founding order, learn it as three waves rather than a fourteenth acronym: the early wave (Virginia 1607, Massachusetts 1620, New Hampshire 1623, Maryland 1634, Connecticut and Rhode Island 1636, Delaware 1638), the takeover wave (the Carolinas from the 1663 charter, New York and New Jersey both seized from the Dutch in 1664, South Carolina's Charles Town 1670), and the two latecomers (Pennsylvania 1681, Georgia 1732). Expect the orders to disagree, and know why: map order runs north to south, founding order runs 1607 to 1732, and ratification order is a third sequence entirely, which is why Delaware calls itself the First State despite being founded thirty-one years after Virginia. A question asking for "the 13 colonies in order" is ambiguous until you know which order is wanted. The practice loop that works: run the quiz cold, note your misses, re-read only the region chunk those misses came from, then run again the next day rather than immediately. Two spaced runs beat six back-to-back ones.

The Colonies People Get Wrong Most Often - and Why

Across attempts on this quiz, misses cluster on a small set of targets, and the pattern is more about pixels than about history. Delaware, Rhode Island and Connecticut are the three smallest click targets on the map, and Delaware and Rhode Island reliably draw the most errors: people know where they are and still miss the shape. The fix is a landmark, not more memorizing. Delaware's northern border is a smooth arc, the only boundary of its kind among the fifty states, so look for the curve at the top of the sliver west of Delaware Bay. Rhode Island is the notch bitten into the coast between Connecticut and Massachusetts, split down the middle by Narragansett Bay. Connecticut is the tidy rectangle sitting on Long Island Sound, directly across the water from Long Island.

The Carolina swap is the most common non-size error. The tell is neighbors, not shape: North Carolina is the one that touches Virginia, South Carolina is the one that touches Georgia. If you need a second cue, the Outer Banks and the sharp elbow of Cape Hatteras belong to North Carolina; Charleston and a coast that angles away to the southwest belong to South Carolina. Around the Delaware Bay, three colonies get mixed constantly. New Jersey is east of the bay. Delaware is the strip west of the bay, occupying the top of the Delmarva Peninsula. Maryland owns the rest of that peninsula plus the land wrapping west around Chesapeake Bay, so Maryland is the only one of the three that appears on both sides of a bay.

Two more traps are worth naming. New Hampshire is a narrow wedge that looks interchangeable with Vermont, but only one of them touches the ocean: New Hampshire has a short Atlantic coastline of roughly thirteen miles, Vermont is landlocked, and Vermont was not one of the thirteen anyway. And Massachusetts reads as two pieces to many players, because the mainland block and the hooked arm of Cape Cod with its offshore islands do not look like one unit; click the mainland block. If any of these cost you a run, restart the quiz immediately with just those pairs in mind. Chasing a single specific miss is a faster way to fix it than replaying the whole set blind.

Why This Map Uses Modern State Borders (and What the Real Colonial Borders Looked Like)

This quiz draws the colonies on modern state outlines. That is a teaching convention, not an accident: modern outlines are the shapes students already recognize, they match every classroom wall map and textbook diagram, and colonial borders in 1775 were genuinely unsettled in places, so any "accurate" map would have to pick a year and defend it. It is worth knowing exactly what the convention hides, because the real story is a better one than the clean map suggests.

Start with the Maryland-Pennsylvania line. Maryland's 1632 charter ran north to the 40th parallel. Pennsylvania's 1681 charter set its southern edge at "the beginning of the fortieth degree" of latitude, and the two readings could not both be right: the 40th parallel passes just north of central Philadelphia, so Maryland's version would have placed Philadelphia inside Maryland. The dispute was not academic. It turned violent in the 1730s in the fighting known as Cresap's War along the contested strip, and it was finally resolved by hiring two English astronomers, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who surveyed the line between 1763 and 1767. Their boundary sits at 39 degrees 43 minutes north, well south of the parallel Maryland wanted.

Delaware is stranger still. Its northern boundary is a twelve-mile arc struck from the courthouse cupola in New Castle, which is why the state has a curved top edge. Where that circle met the Mason-Dixon survey lines, the geometry left an unclaimed sliver of a few hundred acres known as the Wedge, claimed by both Pennsylvania and Delaware and not finally settled in Delaware's favor until 1921. Meanwhile the western sides of these colonies were not lines at all: several charters granted land "from sea to sea," so Pennsylvania, Virginia, Connecticut and Maryland all pressed competing claims toward the Ohio Valley, Virginia and Pennsylvania both claimed the forks of the Ohio where Pittsburgh now stands, and the resulting deadlock delayed ratification of the Articles of Confederation until 1781. On a modern-borders map, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia look like separate places; in the colonial period they were the western reaches of Virginia and North Carolina.

What Was NOT One of the 13 Colonies

The places players hover over expecting a click are almost always the same four. Maine was not a fourteenth colony: it was governed as part of Massachusetts and did not become a separate state until 1820. Vermont was not a colony either; it was the contested New Hampshire Grants, claimed by both New Hampshire and New York, and it functioned as an independent republic from 1777 before joining as the fourteenth state in 1791. Florida was British in 1775, but it was not one of the thirteen: Britain acquired it from Spain in 1763 and split it into East Florida, governed from St. Augustine, and West Florida, governed from Pensacola. Both stayed loyal to the Crown and were handed back to Spain in 1783.

Canada is absent for the same reason. Quebec came to Britain in 1763 with the end of the Seven Years' War, and Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were long-standing British possessions. So were Prince Edward Island, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Barbados and the Leeward Islands. British America in 1775 was far larger than thirteen colonies. The thirteen are simply the ones that rebelled, which makes "the 13 colonies" a political grouping first and a geographic one second.

Two colonies vanished by absorption rather than by never existing, and they trip up careful readers. Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620, was folded into Massachusetts Bay under the royal charter of 1691, which is why Plymouth is not a separate answer despite being the more famous founding. New Haven Colony was a distinct government until Connecticut's 1662 charter swallowed it, with the merger completed in 1664. New Sweden, the original European settlement on the Delaware, passed to the Dutch and then the English and ended up as Delaware. This quiz asks for the thirteen that declared independence in 1776, so those earlier entities are out of scope by design, not by omission.

All 13 Colonies at a Glance: Founded, By Whom, and Why

New England. Massachusetts: Plymouth 1620 by Separatists, Massachusetts Bay 1630 under John Winthrop, merged 1691 into a royal province; motive religious. New Hampshire: settled from 1623 near present-day Portsmouth, governed from Massachusetts on and off before becoming a separate royal colony in 1679; motive fishing and trade. Rhode Island: founded 1636 by Roger Williams after his banishment from Massachusetts, secured a royal charter in 1663 guaranteeing liberty of conscience; a self-governing charter colony. Connecticut: founded 1636 under Thomas Hooker at Hartford, royal charter 1662; also self-governing, and along with Rhode Island one of only two colonies that elected its own governor.

Middle. New York: Dutch New Netherland from the 1620s, taken by the English in 1664 and granted to the Duke of York, royal colony from 1685; motive trade. New Jersey: carved out of that same 1664 grant for Berkeley and Carteret, divided into East and West Jersey, reunited as a royal colony in 1702. Pennsylvania: granted to William Penn in 1681 in settlement of a debt owed to his father, a proprietary colony founded as a Quaker refuge with unusual religious tolerance. Delaware: European settlement began as New Sweden in 1638 at Fort Christina, passed to the Dutch and then the English, and became part of Penn's grant; its path is the odd one, winning its own legislature in 1704 while continuing to share Pennsylvania's governor right up to 1776.

Southern. Maryland: chartered 1632 to Cecilius Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, settled 1634 at St. Mary's City as a proprietary colony and a refuge for English Catholics. Virginia: the first, founded 1607 at Jamestown by the Virginia Company for profit, converted to a royal colony in 1624 after the company failed. North Carolina: settled from the Albemarle region in the 1650s, formalized under the 1663 Carolina charter, separated from South Carolina in 1712 and made royal in 1729. South Carolina: Charles Town founded 1670 by the same proprietors, likewise royal from 1729. Georgia: chartered 1732 to trustees led by James Oglethorpe and settled at Savannah in 1733 as a debtors' refuge and a military buffer against Spanish Florida, becoming a crown colony in 1752. That leaves the charter tally at 1775: two self-governing charter colonies (Connecticut, Rhode Island), three proprietary (Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland), and eight royal.

Using This Quiz in the Classroom (Grades 5-8)

Grade 5 is the natural home for this. Texas TEKS puts the colonial period in the grade 5 US history course, and Indiana's grade 5 standards go a step further by asking students to identify and locate the thirteen British colonies by region, which is precisely what a click-the-map format assesses and a matching worksheet does not. Grade 8 TEKS returns to the colonial era as the opening stretch of a US-history survey, where the quiz works as a five-minute diagnostic before you start the road to revolution rather than as new content.

A lesson flow that holds up: teach the three regions before any names, because the documented top struggle in colonial units is students who cannot tell New England from Middle from Southern and therefore have no structure to file thirteen names into. Spend the first block on 4-4-5 and the coastline logic (New England is the northern hook, the Middle colonies are the four around the Delaware and Hudson, the Southern five run from Chesapeake Bay to Georgia). Only then hand out the mnemonic, and only then do map runs. Reversing that order produces students who can chant thirteen names and still cannot place Delaware.

Because the quiz needs no signup and no download and remembers a best score on the device, it slots into short classroom slots cleanly. As a bellringer, one timed run at the start of class with students writing down only their misses. As a review-game round, project it and have teams call out the click before you make it, which forces them to argue about Carolinas and Delmarva out loud. As an exit ticket, one run plus a written sentence naming the region of the colony they missed. If you are choosing between formats, note what this does that a printable cannot: it grades instantly, so the misses are visible while the lesson is still in the room, and a student can immediately re-run the same set instead of waiting for a marked page to come back.

13 Colonies map quiz — FAQ

What were the 13 original colonies?: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia — the British colonies that declared independence in 1776.
Why does the quiz use modern state borders?: It is the standard classroom convention. Actual colonial borders were larger and often disputed — Massachusetts included Maine, and Virginia's charter claims extended far west — but map quizzes use today's state shapes for clarity.
Which colonies are hardest to find on the map?: Delaware and Rhode Island, the two smallest, cause the most misses. Distinguishing North from South Carolina and remembering New Hampshire sits east of Vermont (which was not a colony) are the other common errors.
What are the 13 colonies in order from north to south?: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia.
What are the three regions and which colonies are in each?: New England (4): New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut. Middle (4): New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware. Southern (5): Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia.
Which colony was founded first and which was last?: Virginia was first, at Jamestown in 1607. Georgia was last, chartered in 1732 and settled at Savannah in 1733.
Was Maine or Vermont one of the 13 colonies?: No. Maine was governed as part of Massachusetts until it became a state in 1820. Vermont was the disputed New Hampshire Grants and joined as the 14th state in 1791.
Do I need an account or a download to take the quiz?: No. It is free, runs in your browser, and needs no signup. Your best score is saved locally on your device.

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