Early Life and Career
Bollman was born in Baltimore, Maryland to German immigrants, and was the seventh of eight children. His father died when Wendell was 11, and he quit school to support his family. Bollman began his career with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) as a carpenter in 1828, just as the B&O began laying track. He left shortly thereafter to build houses. During this period he married Ann Smith; the couple would have 10 children. In 1837 he returned to the B&O as a carpenter, but was soon promoted to line foreman by Benjamin H. Latrobe, II. Although the early B&O bridges in central Maryland were stone arch types (the Thomas Viaduct is perhaps the most impressive), wood bridges became common on the line west of Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and Bollman began to design some of them. In 1848 he was made responsible for all bridges on the line. Noticing that wooden bridges had a life-span of only about 10 years, he began looking at using iron for his bridges. At that time railroads made limited use of iron bridges. After a failure of an iron bridge on the New York and Erie in 1849, that railroad stopped using them.
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