the Tom Green County Courthouse for an exhibit on local history, and there established what would become the Fort Concho Museum. After the museum began expanding into other rooms of the courthouse, Carson moved it into Fort Concho's headquarters building on August 8, 1930. Carson struggled to raise a sum of $6,000 ($, adjusted for inflation) to purchase the building from its owner, who in 1935 relented and accepted the $3,000 ($, adjusted for inflation) she had been able to raise. That same year, the city of San Angelo assumed partial administrative responsibility for the museum, to be managed by a board of directors headed by Carson until she retired in 1953. Funding for the museum was slashed during the Great Depression and World War II, though four buildings were acquired in 1939. Further acquisitions occurred in the later 1940s, until the 1950s Texas drought again strained municipal resources. The museum was made a department of the city of San Angelo in 1955, but only one property purchased in that decade; the Fort Concho Museum by this time controlled only about a quarter of the fort grounds. In the 1960s, the city of San Angelo sought to cede the Fort Concho Museum to the federal and state governments, but both were prioritizing other Texas forts. On July 4, 1961, Fort Concho was named a National Historic Landmark District, and on October 15, 1966, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, by the National Park Service (NPS). A plan was prepared by the NPS in 1961, and again in 1967. In 1980, the Fort Concho Museum collaborated with Bell, Klein and Hoffman, an Austin-based architecture firm specializing in restorations, to prepare another, three-phase plan to acquire the rest of the fort's grounds and demolish its 19th and 20th century modifications. The museum began implementing that plan in 1981, spending over $900,000 ($). Those funds were raised by matched grants from the NPS via the Historic Preservation Fund. The parade ground was then brought fully under the museum's control with the move of the school to a new campus. An NPS survey in June 1985 found that the fort was in generally good condition, though a number of later buildings were still on its grounds. On January 1, 1986, it was named a Texas State Antiquities Landmark by the Texas Historical Commission. By 1989, the district consisted of 16