About Springfield Mountain : Sam Hinton provides a several song history of this ballad in his Folkways album The traveling folksong. he also has quite a bit of background about the different versions he performs. The first is a historical ballad and the last is a comic musci hall number.

About snakes in MA: Remember this was in colonial days when Native Americans were also prevalent in MA, just look up the history of Deerfield sometime. I don't think you see many of them up there today either.