The Ashgrove Group

The best-evidenced material in this folder comes from one small outfit, for one dull reason: they kept minutes.

Ashgrove was six or seven people — the number is disputed and the dispute is not interesting — working around a switching plant two routes over from Ferris. They were not a board and not a club. The nearest honest description is a standards committee that nobody had asked for.

What they did

They wrote things down in a form intended to be read by strangers later. Drafts carried revision numbers. Decisions carried the reason and, separately, the objection that had been overruled. Where a document superseded another, it said which.

This is completely ordinary practice and it is nearly unique here. Everything else in the tradition survives as recollection, as a fourteen-word ledger fragment, or as a newsletter with no masthead. Ashgrove survives as paper, and the three lore/cold-handshake documents are consequently the only material anyone can argue about on the evidence rather than about the evidence.

lore/pell is the name attached to the drafting, though the papers themselves are careful to attribute to the group.

Why they are resented

Two reasons, one respectable.

The respectable one is that Ashgrove's habits are the opposite of the Loop's. The bridge's whole appeal was that it kept no record — see lore/ferris-loop — and a group that documented its proceedings was, in the plainest terms, doing the thing the culture existed to avoid. The objection is not that they wrote things down. It is that they wrote things down about other people's practice, and turned manners into a specification, which is how a manner stops being one.

The unrespectable reason is that they were right about the lore/the-deprecation, and said so in a way that left no room to be misremembered.

The custody question

Ashgrove denies holding the lore/marchford ledger. That denial is worth more than the two competing claims put together, precisely because a group with a documented filing habit has no obvious reason to conceal a holding and every reason to catalogue one.

It is also the only substantive thing they have said about Marchford in thirty years, which some read as a group declining to speculate and others as a group that knows something and has decided the honest form of that knowledge is silence.

Both readings are consistent with everything in lore/sources and neither is testable, which is the ordinary condition of this material and worth stating rather than resolving.

After

The group is generally said to have stopped meeting sometime in the early nineties. No dissolution is recorded, which for these people is unusual enough to be evidence of something, though nobody agrees what.

The papers are still held, still complete, and have been shown to at least four people who have described them consistently — the strongest chain of custody anywhere in this folder, and the reason lore/cold-handshake can be discussed in a normal voice.