100 Days of Us
Fort Wayne · Vol. 01 · 2026
About Listen The Book Events Day 042 / 100
An oral history of one American city

One hundred neighbors.
One hundred days.
One Fort Wayne.

Every day for one hundred days, a new portrait and story appears here — a butcher, a barber, a welder, a third-grade teacher, a bus driver, a mother of four. All of them live in Fort Wayne. Click any face to hear them tell it themselves.

· Released: 42 Remaining: 58
Hover a face · Click to read & listen

About the project.

100 Days of Us is a documentary portrait and oral history project based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Beginning on March 1, 2026, we released one portrait and one story each day for one hundred days — an attempt to listen to a single American city in its own words.

All one hundred participants live, work, or were raised in Fort Wayne. Subjects were selected through a combination of neighborhood outreach, personal nomination and a Story Council of representatives from different neighborhoods throughout the city. Every interview was recorded, transcribed, and edited in collaboration with the person speaking. Portraits were made on site, in the places they chose.

Printed portraits are installed throughout the city, in storefront windows and on building walls. Each one carries a QR code linking back to the story you're reading now.

Made possible by our neighbors.

100 Days of Us is produced with the support of the City of Fort Wayne, businesses, foundations, and residents. Every portrait printed and posted in the city is paid for by the names below.

100 Days of Us is a project by Storyville
100daysofsaginaw.com · © 2026 An oral history of the city Culminates Jun 8 — Exhibition & Storytelling Night
100 Days of Us
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Day 042 of 100 · Baker · 62

Maria
Delgado.

the baker on Wells
"I never thought I'd end up running the bakery my grandfather built. I thought I'd leave, and then I didn't, and then I couldn't imagine leaving."

Maria was born on the same block as her grandfather's bakery, and on most mornings you can still find her there by four a.m. She unlocks the side door, flips on the oven hoods, and sets the first batch of bread before the streetlights on State have gone out. By the time the regulars arrive — the nurses coming off shift, the man who works the early bus — the smell has already reached the corner.

"The flour still comes in fifty-pound sacks," she says. "That's how it was. That's how it is. I don't know why we'd change it."

Her grandfather opened the shop in 1947, a year after he and her grandmother arrived in Fort Wayne from a town in central Mexico whose name Maria never learned to pronounce properly. For forty-two years he worked the bakery six days a week. Her father took over in 1989 and worked it until his back gave out in 2011. Maria had been living in Austin then, managing a boutique hotel, and had not planned to come back.

"I came home for three months to help. That was fourteen years ago."

She talks about the bakery the way some people talk about their children — proud, exhausted, unsentimental. The equipment is old. Rent has gone up. The neighborhood has changed, though she is quick to say it has not only changed for the worse. "There are more kids on this block than there were in 2015," she says. "I love that."

When asked what she wishes people knew about Fort Wayne, she does not hesitate: "That it's still here. That people are still making things. That the story didn't end when the factory closed."

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