In the mid-1850's, this area of Utah County was brought under cultivation and irrigation, and a survey in the 1860's known as the New Survey designated where permanent roads and irrigation ditches would be. Leland has long been a highly productive irrigated agricultural area, with major crops including barley, wheat, corn, sugar beets, and alfalfa, as well as canning crops such as peas, lima beans, and sweet corn, while beef and dairy cattle have been the major livestock. LDS Church records said the community was originally the South Branch of Spanish Fork 2nd Ward and later the Riverside Branch, 2nd Ward. On April 29, 1900, LDS Apostle Reed Smoot officially organized a new ward, and those present selected the name Leland after Leland Stanford, founder of Leland Stanford University. The new Leland Ward had a membership of 224. In 1900, Church Historian Andrew Jensen recorded that Leland Ward consisted of Latter-day Saints living in a farming district southwest of Spanish Fork, centered at the Leland school house on the county road about 1/2 mile south of the Spanish Fork River and 2 1/2 miles by nearest road from the center of Spanish Fork. He wrote that the ward extended about 2 miles east, 2 miles south, 1 mile west, and 1 1/2 miles north from the school house, or about 4 miles from north to south and about the same from east to west, making the area something like 4 miles square. Nearly all of the inhabitants within the ward's limits were Latter-day Saints, and meetings and Sunday School sessions were held in the district school house.