Beginning in 1920, the Allegany Courthouse became the primary gathering place for regular meetings of the Seneca Council and, over the next forty years, served as the governmental center and socio-political epicenter of the Seneca Nation. Between 1936 and 1966, it was the main place where the Nation discussed, debated, and formulated strategies to prevent the United States government from taking 10,000 acres of treaty-protected Seneca land along the Allegany River for the Kinzua Dam Project. After a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle in the mid-twentieth century, one-third of the Allegany Territory was flooded beginning in 1966, bringing the taking, loss, and destruction of ancestral hunting, fishing, and gathering areas, farms, homes, churches, schools, the ceremonial longhouse, and burial grounds, and forcing the relocation of more than 600 people. The resistance to the dam strengthened Seneca determination to protect sovereignty, helped create a new generation of activists, and advanced the suffrage movement of Seneca women. The first record of Seneca women seeking the right to vote in Nation elections occurred there in 1935, and although that effort failed, women later staffed committees, testified before the United States Congress, and helped organize the removal during the Kinzua Dam controversy. Their participation and leadership in that fight influenced the male-dominated leadership to grant women the right to vote and hold office in the Seneca Nation in 1964.