Much turned in these early years upon the personality of the Governor. In several instances, the choice of rulers for the new provinces proved fortunate. This was particularly so in the case of John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1799. He was a good soldier and a just and vigorous administrator, particularly wise in setting his regulars to work building roads such as Yonge Street and Dundas Street, which to this day are great provincial arteries of travel. Yet there were many sources of weakness in the scheme of government--divided authority, absenteeism, personal unfitness. When Dorchester was reappointed in 1786, he had been made Governor in Chief of all British North America. From the beginning, however, the Lieutenant Governors of the various provinces asserted independent authority, and in a few years the Governor General became in fact merely the Governor of the most populous province, Lower Canada, in which he resided. In Upper Canada, as in New Brunswick, the population was at first much at one. In time, however, discordant elements appeared. Religious, or at least denominational, differences began to cause friction. The great majority of the early settlers in Upper Canada belonged to the Church of England, whose adherents in the older colonies had nearly all taken the Loyalist side. Of the Ulster Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists who formed the backbone of the Revolution, few came to Canada. The growth of the Methodists and Baptists in the United States after the Revolution, however, made its mark on the neighboring country. The first Methodist class meetings in Upper Canada, held in the United Empire Loyalist settlement on the Bay of Quinte in 1791, were organized by itinerant preachers from the United States; and in the western part of the province pioneer Baptist evangelists from the same country reached the scattered settlers neglected by the older churches. Nor was it in religion alone that diversity grew. Simcoe had set up a generous land policy which brought in many "late Loyalists," American settlers whose devotion to monarchical principles would not always bear close inquiry. The fantastic experiment of planting in the heart of the woods of Upper Canada a group of French nobles driven out by the Revolution left no trace; but Mennonites, Quakers, and Scottish Highlanders contributed diverse and permanent factors to the life of the province. Colonel Thomas Talbot of Malahide, "a fierce little Irishman who hated Scotchmen and women, turned teetotallers out of his house, and built the only good road in the province," made the beginnings of settlement midway on Lake Erie. A shrewd Massachusetts merchant, Philemon Wright, with his comrades, their families, servants, horses, oxen, and 10,000 pounds, sledded from Boston to Montreal in the winter of 1800, and thence a hundred miles beyond, to found the town of Hull and establish a great lumbering industry in the Ottawa Valley.