Area code 785
area codes in the United States
Area code 785 is a telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan for most of the northern part of the U.S. state Kansas. It was created in a split of the numbering plan area 913 on July 20, 1997. The numbering plan area stretches from the Colorado state line on the west to the Missouri state line on the east, while excluding the Kansas side of the Kansas City metropolitan area, which retained 913. The largest city by population is Topeka, the state capital city.
History
When the area code system was created in 1947, the southern half of the state (Dodge City, Emporia, Garden City, Wichita) was designated as numbering plan area 316, while the northern half (Kansas City, Topeka, Lawrence, Goodland, Manhattan, Salina, Hays) received area code 913.
This configuration remained in place for 40 years. However, by the mid-1990s, 913 was close to exhaustion due to the rapid growth of the Kansas City area, as well as the proliferation of cell phones and pagers. The latter was especially pronounced in the eastern part of the 913 territory (the Kansas City suburbs, Topeka, and Lawrence), home to the bulk of the numbering plan's available numbers.
Late in 1996, the Kansas Corporation Commission, which oversees telecommunications in the state, requested relief from the North American Numbering Plan Administration (NANPA) for the exchanges of area code 913. On February 12, 1997, the NANPA announced that 913 would be cut back to the Kansas side of the Kansas City area, while most of the western portion of the old 913 plan area–everything from Lawrence westward–was split off as area code 785, effective on July 20, 1997.
The public source identifies “Area code 785” as area codes in the United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Area, code and area.
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This entry incorporates text from “Area code 785” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.