Going to town

anybody know the origin of this phrase? used, for example, if i'm eating a burger very quickly, without paying attention to anything else, you might say i'm going to town on that burger.

They're still saying that? In the 1950s, my mother and her garden-club friends used the expression when talking about a plant that had bloomed profusely. "That pelargonium that I started from a slip--well, this spring it just went to town." I suppose it comes from earlier times when most people lived in the countryside and a trip to town was a major adventure.