660 Area Code – Sedalia, Missouri: Location, Time Zone & History

Sedalia, the largest city under area code 660, has hosted the Missouri State Fair on its fairgrounds every year since 1901, and in the late 1890s it was home to composer Scott Joplin, who wrote and published "Maple Leaf Rag" there in 1899 — the piece credited with launching ragtime as a national musical style. The city has celebrated that legacy since 1974 with the Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival. Kirksville, another city in the same numbering territory, holds its own historical distinction as the home of A.T. Still University's Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, founded in 1892 as the world's first osteopathic medical school, alongside Truman State University, founded in 1867.

Area code 660 was created by a split rather than an overlay: it separated from 816 effective October 12, 1997, taking the rural northern and western portions of Missouri — including Sedalia, Kirksville, Warrensburg, Moberly, Marshall, and Maryville — while 816 remained with the Kansas City metro area. A permissive dialing period allowed either code until April 19, 1998, and mandatory ten-digit local dialing only arrived in October 2021, adopted to free up the 988 code for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

The region's identity today remains closely tied to agriculture and to higher education, alongside manufacturing and healthcare. With population growth modest across its counties, 660 is among the more sparsely used area codes in the country, with exhaustion of available numbers not projected until roughly 2043.