HILL CITY, SD — Jackie Miley did not have an easy childhood.

Growing up in foster care in St. Paul, Minnesota, Miley didn't have much. Not even a teddy bear. But now, decades later, she is the owner of a teddy bear. More than 10,000 of them, actually.

Miley, the curator of Teddy Bear Town in Hill City, South Dakota, has more teddy bears than anyone else in the world. Each has a spot inside a modest home on a Main Street drag of a town that's home to less than 800 people. "I never had a bear as a child," said Miley. "After hearing people's stories about how their bear was comforting, I always wished for one to cling to."

She recalls the first time she ever laid eyes on a teddy bear, one day at the Minnesota State Fair when she was 8 years old. "I remember I had one nickel left, and you could buy a lot of candy for a nickel back then," she remembered, thinking instead she'd try her luck at a game that would result in her very first teddy as a prize.

"Well, I threw my nickel and hit the plate, but my nickel fell off and I didn't win," she said. "I knew I should have picked the candy." Miley moved to Hill City in 2002 to take a job as a live-in desk clerk at the Super 8 motel at the center of town. At that time she did have a bear. It was a "Build-a-Bear" she built at the Ripley's Museum in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, when visiting her son. Teddy bears line the walls and the floors at Teddy Bear Town in South Dakota. Photo by Tim Moran / Patch Fast-forward 14 years, and that one bear has paved the way for a Guinness World Record, one she's had re-certified five times. "What little time I could get away from the motel, I'd go to Rapid City and the different thrift stores," she said. "I'd see a bear that was cute, different and get it."