Origin of "rolled up the sidewalks"

I have not been able to find an original source and the phrase doesn't seem to be more than a century old (and not even that). The OED gives a definition, but no origin.

A comment I read somewhere, however, seemed to make a bit of sense. Rolling up the sidewalks are a simile of sorts; just like you'd roll up the carpet when it's no longer needed, the sidewalks are no longer needed when there's nothing going on, so they metaphorically roll them up.

Other than the unattested assertion in a reputable source — Cassell's Dictionary of Slang, 2005 — that the phrase 'to roll up the sidewalks' dates from the middle of the 1800s, I can find no evidence of figurative or comedic use of "roll up the sidewalks" (et al. variants) than 1905, in A Bundle of Burnt Cork Comedy, by Harry Lee Newton:

We had to take the girls home early, because they roll up the sidewalks there at nine o'clock.

The next appearance was in 1917:

From The Kane Republican, Kane, Pennsylvania, 13 Dec 1917.

Cassell's gives a very specific definition of the figurative sense:

of shops and entertainment in towns or cities, to close down at nightfall.

Cassell's definition differs from the more general sense given in OED Online:

to cause all entertainment or leisure pursuits to cease (in a location).

While Cassell's places the origin of the expression in the US, OED Online places it more broadly, in North America (that is, including Canada). Yet the earliest (1925) and later attestations provided by OED Online are from US publications.

The broader sense observed by the OED lexicographers, along with the assertion in Cassell's that the phrase originated in the mid-1800s, suggests that a conceptual origin may be found in the confluence of two events in the later 1800s. One of these events was the building of the "original boardwalk" in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which opened to the public in 1870:

The original boardwalk was actually a temporary structure, which was pulled up and stored during the offseason.

From Boardwalk Stories, "A History of the Boardwalk".

The Atlantic City boardwalk is, however, the "original boardwalk" only when 'boardwalk' is used in a narrow specialized sense, that is, when the term designates one among a set of notable promenades, "especially of planks, along a beach or waterfront" (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition) usually associated with a well-known city business or entertainment district. The more general sense of 'a wooden path', arose much earlier, as is evidenced by this clip from The Pittsburgh Gazette, 29 Jan 1845:

Another possible concrete (that is, not figurative) origin of the phrase was the patenting of the "movable sidewalk" in 1871:

In 1871 inventor Alfred Speer patented a system of moving sidewalks that he thought would revolutionize pedestrian travel in New York City.

From Smithsonian.com, "Moving Sidewalks Before The Jetsons".

Both of these 19th century events received attention in the popular press, and they may have given rise, perhaps by a slow-burgeoning conflation in the popular imagination, to figurative uses of the phrase in the early 1900s.

I have, however, found no textual evidence linking the notions of moving sidewalks and temporary boardwalks in the late 1800s with the early 1900s figurative mentions of the rolling up of sidewalks after the usual hours, or season, of business.

A possible meaning and origin might be to remove the display stands from the sidewalks which were common in Europe and it was done in the past in the USA too. Now it is not commonly done in the USA anymore.

An example would be at a farmers market when the market is done the farmers remove or roll up their display stands.

Another is that they used to use temporary boardwalks that can be rolled up. See: http://mitchellismoving.blogspot.com/2013/12/fuengirola-rolls-up-sidewalks.html

In the past, it was done when the streets were not paved and muddy so people would place these temporary sidewalks.

I wonder if it's German in origin. They have an expression to describe a town where nothing happens - in the evening, 'da werden die Bürgersteige (or Gehsteige) hochgeklappt'.