WASHINGTON, Conn. — In 1999, a television writer named Amy Sherman-Palladino vacationed at the Mayflower Grace, a five-star inn built high on a hill here. In true Hollywood fashion, Ms. Sherman-Palladino returned to her hometown, Los Angeles, and from her brief visit spun Stars Hollow — a charming New England small town with its own resident troubadour. Stars Hollow would become the setting for “Gilmore Girls,” her cultishly popular mother-daughter dramedy that ran for seven seasons on the WB (and later the CW).

Last weekend, more than 1,300 fans, most of them women, many of them mothers and daughters, descended on this rural town in western Connecticut (population: 3,500) for the first Gilmore Girls Fan Fest. They had come from Oklahoma and Minnesota and as far away as Brazil — and paid as much as $250 per ticket — to see the “real” Stars Hollow and meet some of the actors who play its residents. In a way, they wanted to do the impossible: to experience in waking life a dream town built on a studio backlot.