No man of his time was more energetic in pushing the confines of settlement and encouraging development than Governor Spotswood of Virginia (1710-1722), a stalwart soldier who had fought under Marlborough. He built iron furnaces, introduced German vine-growers, made peace with the Indians, and established several excellent mission schools for them upon the frontier; under his administration the fur-trade spread far inland, and he did much to extend topographical knowledge of Virginia by fostering exploration. Sidenote: The mountain borderers. The Shenandoah valley, opened to settlement by Spotswood, became, after 1730, a notable home for Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, driven by English persecution from their home in Ulster. They were by this time coming over to America in two steady streams, one pouring in at Philadelphia, and the other at Charleston, S. C. Those arriving at Philadelphia pushed westward to the mountains, and drifting southwestward through the long parallel valleys of the Alleghany range, met in the Shenandoah and kindred valleys those of their brethren who had gone up into the hills of Carolina. It was from these frontier valley homes that the migration into Kentucky and Tennessee proceeded a generation later, led by such daring spirits as Boone, Sevier, and Robertson. 122. Schemes of Colonial Union (1690-1754). Sidenote: Governmental plans. Schemes for a union of the colonies, to provide for the common defence and settle intercolonial differences, were numerous enough, after the example set by the New England Confederacy (Chapter VII.). They emanated almost entirely, however, from the government party, and chiefly for this reason were regarded with popular suspicion. In 1690 a continental congress had been held at New York for the purpose of treating with the Iroquois against the common enemy, New France (page 206, § 86). In 1697 William Penn laid before the Board of Trade a plan providing for a high commissioner, appointed by the king, to preside over a council composed of two delegates from each province, and to act as commander-in-chief in times of war. The scheme aroused much opposition from colonial pamphleteers, and failed of adoption; other plans which were promulgated from time to time, for the next sixty years, were in the main adaptations of Penn's, some of them providing for two or three strongly centralized provinces, each to be presided over by a Viceroy, assisted by a council of colonial delegates. Sidenote: Neighborhood congresses.