Ray Trussell led his neighbors in an effort to build a new concrete version of their irrigation ditch following the 1916 flood. From his personal records it appears that the effort took four or five years. Ray, who took a liking to working with concrete (he also built a concrete silo), made all the pipe for the project in a manufacturing set up on his ranch. He also led the effort, installing significantly more concrete distribution lines on his ranch than did the others. No doubt the idea was to eliminate the heavy, regular maintenance that was required to control weeds on the original irrigation ditch. The ultimate system began, as the ditch had, with a sand dam in the river with a large ditch running from it. But as soon as the ditch rounded the point of Crane's peak, it went into a 30 in. pipeline via an inlet works that also accomodated diversions directly to the Georgeson place to the South via a smaller 18 in. pipeline going under the road. The brains of the system were the distribution boxes. These are of the first such distribution box on the system, the only one that still bears the same square appearance today that they all did originally. In each box the company line came in a pipe in one side (below right). Flow could then be returned to the company line via a gate valve (bottom). The gates had home-made operators (below left) with a little suicide knob made of pipe. It took a lot of turns to open one of those gates. Flow to the local farm was accomplished through the use of smaller, but similar, gate valves and pipelines directing flow to a particular ranch (see valves on side of box, bottom).
