The National Irrigation Congress was held periodically in the Western United States beginning in 1891 and ending in 1916, by which time the organization had changed its name to International Irrigation Congress. It was a "powerful pressure group."

Commissioner Frederick St. George de Lautour Booth-Tucker, was a senior Salvation Army officer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the son-in-law of Willam and Catherine Booth, the Army's founders.