Green’s Dictionary of Slang

a suburban ribbon development.

1908		Quad-City Times (Davenport, IA) 8 Mar. 5/6: South Muscatine levee will soon be graced with an even larger String Town than that [...] at the big Bend above the city.
1957		Lubbock Eve. Jrnl (TX) 7 June 16/5: Already such ‘stringtowns’ have developed [...] There are still many areas, [...] such as High Plains, where ‘string cities’ will, of necessity, be a long time developing.
1963		Beckley Post-Herald (WV) 24 Nov. 20/8: He predicts a ‘string city’ extending from Maine to Alabama within the next 25 years.
1996		Quad-City Times (Davenport, IA) 15 Aug. 2A/1: String Town isn’t really a town at all, most an occasional timid business meandering along a [...] two-mile Amish-land road.
2001		USA Today 22 Feb. 🌐 But in the Southeast, few natural barriers limit growth. Unrelenting sprawl along Interstates 85 and 20 is creating a ‘string city’ that stretches 600 miles between Raleigh, N.C., and Birmingham, Ala.