Plainfield Historical Society Trivia Night: Are You Smarter Than a Third-Grader?

Plainfield history buffs took a night out Tuesday to see whether they were smarter than third-graders.

A couple dozen contestants clustered around card tables at township hall for the Plainfield Historical Society's seventh annual trivia night.

Third grade was a recurring theme throughout the 10 rounds of  friendly quizzing, as this year’s trivia test was peppered with local history questions from a new third-grade curriculum chronicling Plainfield’s pioneer days at Fort Beggs.

“Name four types of weapons gathered by settlers at Fort Beggs,” interrogator Sue Hasenyager challenged.

Guns, sticks, axes, hatchets, scythes and pitchforks were good answers. Bows and arrows were not. That’s what the other guys had.

“I was going to make everybody who didn’t get any right stand up and say ‘I’m not smarter than a third-grader,'” quipped Master of Ceremonies Daryl (Butch) Keene.

But that was too cruel.

Besides, every team got some right answers just by using the very skills cultivated in third grade: taking a wild guess. Contestants scratched their heads to scrawl answers about Plainfield businesses and the earliest Plainfield families. 

“Name three of the original families that settled at Walker’s Grove,” Hasenyager commanded.

Walker was a safe conjecture. Beggs and Flagg were among a half-dozen other acceptable responses.

But, to get good answers in most of the rounds, contestants had to really know their stuff and have lived in Plainfield for a very long time.

What was the name of the hotel that operated for the longest time in downtown Plainfield? Three of five teams knew it was Central or Beggs Hotel.

What is the name of the street that originally was known as Doc Owens Alley? That was Union Street between what is now Route 59 and Route 30.

A few of those deliberating in whispers around the tables and nibbling on home-baked fudge and cookies boasted some of those venerable old surnames.

Don Kinley, who scrambled and ciphered as trivia contest score-keeper, still clips crew cuts at the downtown Plainfield barber shop his great-grandfather opened in 1881.

Even after the ladies of Team One—Ada Findlay, Eileen Wiley and Ann Taylor—had accepted the $20 Walmart gift certificates they won for first prize, the crowd lingered around to spar on bonus questions.

What ninth-grader won the county spelling bee in 1973?

“Bob Barnes,” Don Kinley’s son Randy shouted.

“He was in my class,” said Hasenyager, a retired Plainfield teacher. “We worked so hard for that. We spelled in our sleep.”

Everyone remembered the late Plainfield township assessor “always had his nose in a book.” Sharon Kinley, another former teacher, told how she once saw him sitting in the rain, wearing his little yellow slicker and reading a book as he waited for the school bus.

The Barnes family used to always turn out with a team for the trivia contest, Randy Kinley remembered.

“I don’t think they’ve been back since they got beat,” someone said.

Everybody laughed and Keene passed the basket of cookies.