served as librarians and curators. In the late 1940s, a bill to finance reassembly of Francis Scott Key's home and give it to the society passed Congress, but President Harry Truman vetoed it for budgetary reasons. A professional appointed in 1947 promulgated a collecting policy and created the first catalog. In 1954, the District of Columbia Public Library, which had been storing the society's collections, threatened to evict them because of its own space problems. The society's board of trustees appealed to the membership for a home. In 1955, Amelia Keyser Heurich, widow of prominent Washington brewer Christian Heurich, donated the family's four-story mansion) near Dupont Circle, which became the society's headquarters. The society took possession of the mansion the following year after Mrs. Heurich died. The society hired its first director in 1959, although the office of the board of trustees' president, Ulysses S. Grant III, who served from 1952 to 1968, still performed most of the society's work. For many years the house chairman lived on the third floor and rented offices in the building to other historical and patriotic organizations. Space was available for a library in the mansion, which housed the book, manuscript, photograph and other collections. In 1975, a real estate transaction produced a significant endowment, which was used to hire the first full-time, professional historian as executive director, Perry Fisher. Fisher used the interest in the nation's past stimulated by the U.S. Bicentennial to increase the society's programs and membership. In 1989, the society was renamed the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. and relaunched its magazine Records as the journal Washington History. In 1998, Monica Scott Beckham, vice president of the society's board of trustees, went before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations to seek federal funding for a City Museum of Washington, D.C. Congress appropriated $2 million in 1999 "provided that the District of Columbia shall lease the Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square to the Society ... for 99 years at $1 per year". On July 14, 1999, District Mayor Anthony A. Williams announced the creation of the City Museum of Washington, D.C. in the Carnegie Library. The City Museum opened in May 2003, but closed in November 2004 because of a lack of funding and interest. In 2006, the society and the National Music Center entered into an agreement that permitted the Music Center to occupy