The earliest settlers in Leeds used innovation and hard work to divert water from Leeds Creek to their homes, fields, and industry by carefully choosing a route between the creek and the settlement and digging ditches with picks, shovels, and work horses across rocky terrain while keeping the ditch on a downhill grade so water would continue to flow. Building this system required ingenuity, determination, and labor, and in the late 1800s the Leeds Water Company was established to secure and organize rights to use local water in the arid West. The main ditch carried Leeds Creek water to the northeastern edge of town, where smaller ditches conveyed it to town lots and nearby agricultural fields, with the most prized lots fronting the ditch near its beginning because they had fewer pollutants from upstream use. In 1954, the Leeds Domestic Waterusers Association borrowed $50,000 to build a 9-mile pipeline from a spring high above town at the base of the Pine Valley Mountains because drinking water within Leeds was still being drawn from the open Leeds Ditch, creating an obvious health hazard. With the loan and much of the back-breaking labor supplied by Leeds men, the town gained clean drinking water through a secure system in January 1956. The pioneer method of irrigating by flooding fields through open ditches continued in Leeds until the 21st century, and dirt ditches along Main Street were replaced with concrete lining in 1957. The ditch was a place where children played and people socialized during the summer, but it was also dangerous, and two children drowned over the years. In 2006, the Leeds Water Company, or irrigation company, replaced the open ditches with underground pipes and pressurized irrigation to improve safety and water management. Susan Savage, born in 1946 and a fourth-generation member of a Leeds farming family, remembered hauling drinking water in large metal barrels from a spring near the CCC Camp and not having piped drinking water at her home on the north end of town until the 1950s, while Ray Beal, born in 1937, recalled fetching water from a mine shaft by climbing down a 90-foot ladder when ditch water was too dirty to drink.