There’s still pain. There’s still anger.

But at the 59th Kinzua reunion, those long-standing issues weren’t the theme as over 70 people — residents and descendants — gathered to, well, just be together.

“I don’t think it’s ever been sad,” Paula Burgess Washburn, whose family owned the Kinzua Corydon Telephone Company, said of the reunion.

She said it’s about “people connecting.”

The 59th Kinzua Reunion was held recently at Pellegrino’s. Pictured here are, according to organizer Diane Brant, George and Carol Allison, Opal Krout, who traveled from Arkansas for the reunion, and Kevin Sheldon.

“We can’t shut them up,” Diane Brant joked.

Brant said the rain “kept us even closer” as “no one stepped a foot out of the tent.”

A total of 72 people attended this edition, up considerably over the last couple years. In 2019, 47 people participated while 63 came in 2018. This year, a woman from Arkansas came to Warren for the primary purpose of attending.

“The real problem (is the) people that actually lived there are dying,” Brant said. “It’s their ancestors who are attending. There’s certainly a lot of us that are still coming. I was 16 when we left.”

They keep records regarding who attends each year and those records date to 1992. But a past record keeper noted 2007 as the 45th reunion.

“We’re thinking they had some kind of gathering in 1962,” Washburn said, while there were just a minimal number of people still living in the town.

Washburn sees part of the significance of the event as the stories that are shared.

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She didn’t live in Warren for many years and didn’t attend the reunions either.

“The idea of going made me too sad,” she said.

“It’s still excruciating,” Brant said, “whether I go or whether I don’t go, it is excruciating. All those memories come back up.”

While there are a host of fond memories from life in Kinzua — exploring the area as a child in a safe community, the baseball team, young men getting up to no good, among so many more they could share, the way it ended left deep scars for the residents who witnessed it.

“Each family had to deal with the Corps (of Engineers) individually,” Brant said.

Washburn’s family — operating the telephone company — was required to take the telephone poles and wires down.

But there were instances far more shocking than that. Brant recalled watching a federal employee hurrying out of a “beautiful, beautiful home” and watching it go up in flames. “(It is) excruciating to see all your friends and relatives’ (property) destroyed,” she said. “I could walk to my grandmother’s, (to) six aunts and uncles, cousins. Everybody moved to a different place. Some friends I never saw again.”

“(I) don’t think it hit us when we were teenagers,” Washburn said, that the Seneca Nation received offers to move as a group “and a lot of them did. We were never given that opportunity.”

As the end drew near, people would come to see what was left.

“(It) became something like living in a zoo,” Brant said, as gawkers would just stare. “It was like being an animal or something.”

One of the challenges they face now is that “new people to the area and younger people to the area don’t know there was a town of Kinzua. If we mention the village, they’re gobsmacked,” Brant said.

Next year will mark the last year that Brant and Washburn will coordinate the reunion but they believe they have the people in place to continue the annual gathering, as well as the financial means for it to prosper into the future.

“Hopefully we can just be visitors,” Washburn said.

They’ve established a page on Facebook, as well, to enhance communication and “to share our memories and to share our current history.”

Brant said it’s still important to gather for a pretty basic reason: “To see our friends.”