740 Area Code – Newark, Ohio: Location, Time Zone & History

Ohio's largest area code by geographic size, 740, stretches across a mostly rural, Appalachian swath of the state's southeast and center. It was split off from area code 614 on November 8, 1997, taking everything outside the Columbus/Franklin County core that 614 kept for itself.

By the mid-2010s the territory needed relief of its own: mandatory ten-digit dialing took effect March 21, 2015, and the all-services overlay code 220 went into service that April 22 -- notable among NANP codes as the lowest-numbered one containing neither a 0 nor a 1 as its middle digit.

History runs deep across the 740/220 footprint. Chillicothe served as the capital of the Northwest Territory and as Ohio's first state capital between 1803-1810 and again 1812-1816, and the nearby Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, preserving Hopewell-era earthworks, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2023. Marietta, founded in 1788 at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, is the oldest permanent American settlement in the state. Today the region's economy leans on agriculture, Utica shale oil and gas extraction, manufacturing, and higher education at Ohio University and Denison University, serving cities such as Newark, Zanesville, Chillicothe, Athens, Marietta, Steubenville, Lancaster, and Portsmouth.