College Hill took its name from a succession of schools that began with Cary's Academy for Boys, opened by Freeman Cary in his home on Hamilton Avenue in 1832. As the school outgrew its first quarters, Pleasant Hill Academy was built in 1833 at the corner of Hamilton and Colerain, now Belmont, Avenues. Continued growth and a distinguished faculty led to the creation of Farmers College of Hamilton County, chartered on February 23, 1846, after money was raised by selling shares, mostly to local farmers, and Cary Hall was built on this Belmont Avenue site in 1847. Benjamin Harrison, later President of the United States, attended from 1848 to 1850, and during the 1860s Cary Hall served as a station on the Underground Railroad. Hard times during and after the Civil War led Farmers College to become co-educational, and the closing of nearby Ohio Female College, which had opened in 1849, also aided enrollment. An effort to restore public confidence brought the new name Belmont College in 1884, but in 1887 the college president proposed changing the institution into a high school academy, and the board agreed. In 1890 the school reopened as the Ohio Military Institute with a new building, Belmont Hall, beside Cary Hall, offering young men a college preparatory education along with military instruction. Rising maintenance costs and limits on tuition forced the school to close in 1958, and the forty-seven acre campus was sold to the Cincinnati Board of Education, which opened Aiken High School on part of the property in 1962.