The unidentified tune on Peter Thorp's music box (220124 MMD) is
"Ben Bolt", a 19th-century American sentimental song. Here is the
paragraph I wrote about the song in "Dutton's Roller Organ Cob Handbook"
on the website www.rollerorgans.com (The cob was #1053 on the 20-note
cob roller organ):

"Most of the American pieces in this numerical range so far have been
popular songs from the first half of the 1890s, but this piece is
a much earlier one that was an old favorite by the time it appeared on
a roller organ cob. Its tune was composed by Nelson Kneass (1823-1869),
a Philadelphia-born composer, singer and instrumentalist who headed his
own musical troupe, was a contemporary and musical competitor of
Stephen Foster (see the notes to cob #112) and introduced the song in
a theatrical performance in Pittsburgh.

The words had been written earlier in the form of a poem by
Philadelphia-born medical doctor, author, journalist and ultimately
U.S. Congressman Thomas Dunn English (1819-1902), were first published
in the "New York Mirror" in 1843 and were then provided by someone who
had seen them in the paper, from memory, to Kneass, who set them to
music, so that the lyrics of Kneass' song are different from English's
poem as published.

Despite the title, the song is not about someone named Ben Bolt but
rather is sung to an elderly man named Ben Bolt by a singer who has
been his friend since childhood. It is a sad song of reminiscence about
people and things of the past that no longer exist: the singer first
asks if Ben remembers "sweet Alice", a simple young girl who "wept with
delight when you gave her a smile/And trembled with fear at your frown"
and is now dead and buried. The singer then remembers the old mill,
now in ruins, and the school and schoolmaster, on whose grave grass
now grows, and ends with the statement that "Of all the friends who
were schoolmates then/There remains, Ben, but you and I".

There is sheet music for the song in the Library of Congress with
a copyright date of 1854 and also an item of "souvenir" sheet music
dating from 1895 in the University of Maine Sheet Music Collection
which indicates, on the cover, that the song was sung in a play titled
"Trilby" that was presented at the Shubert Theatre in New York City in
that year; this might account for the inclusion of the tune at this
point in the sequence of cobs, among songs dating from the mid-1890s.

Additional references:

- Tombstone of Kneass in Edgewood Cemetery, Chillicothe, Missouri,
where he died while there for a performance, giving his birth year
as 1823 and death year as 1868 (which is incorrect in light of the
numerous newspaper obituary articles that appeared right after his
death in 1869);

- lengthy article in the May 21, 1893 edition of the "Philadelphia
Times" in which English, then a seventy-four-year-old U.S. Congressman
from New Jersey, recollected how he wrote the poem that was the basis
for the lyrics to the song, how Kneass came to write the tune and how
the resulting song became enormously popular;

- lengthy obituary article about English in the April 2, 1902 edition
of "The Philadelphia Inquirer" titled "Man Who Wrote 'Ben Bolt' is Dead"
and headed by a photograph of English alongside the text of his original
five-stanza poem that was shortened and adapted for the song lyrics;

- notices in the May 27 and 28, 1847 editions of the "Pittsburgh Daily
Post" announcing that Kneass would perform the song "Ben Bolts" [sic]
as part of a concert program at the Eagle Saloon in Pittsburgh, which
contradicts the assertion widely made elsewhere that he first performed
the song in 1848;

- full five-stanza version of the poem, (1) listing no author but
preceded by the note "From the New Mirror" and published in the February
2, 1844 edition of the "Pittsburgh Post", and (2) credited to English
and published in the October 18, 1845 edition of the "Pittsburgh Post",
either of which might have been the source from which Kneass' version
was derived rather than the original 1843 "New York Mirror" printing"

Richard Dutton
https://rollerorgans.com/