A most interesting bit of film, from very early in cinematic history--supposedly a parody of Lackawanna's Phoebe Snow advertising campaign, or alternately an advertising film with a bit of humor. I'll let you decide which, but one has to admit, with the music currently chosen, it's a pretty thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5W-LnzMO4w

I wonder if the film would have originally been by a ragtime tune. Ragtime wasn't always the bouncy, fast thing people today think it is;Scott Joplin was constantly advising players in the arrangement notes of his pieces not to play them too fast.

Ragtime always fast? Listen to Joplin's "Bethena," which is a beautiful little concert waltz, to get a glimpse of where ragtime could and did go.

Very nice period film.

How would the verses have read, if Phoebe Snow was a character of the Diesel age?

"..keeping gown free from soil,
upon the road of Diesel oil."

There are color EMD ads in several major magazines in the early 1950's that featured a modern version of Phoebe Snow with updated verses advertising diesels for General Motors.

PC

In 1903, most films did not have scores to accompany them. A short film like this might have been viewed in a Nickelodeon rather than a theater. So you heard the sounds of other people watching and reacting to their movies.
I don't know what the first movie to have written sheet music to go with it was, but most movie parlors would have a pianist or organist just play a riff along to the scene. Usually very simple stuff, chase music, heroic themes, sappy homesick music, wedding march. I guess ragtime might have been played if the piano player liked it himself. In the days of silent movies, you heard what the man at the instrument felt like playing.