Thanks to Alexander Schick for pointing out the digitization of photos in the Duke University Archives related to the exhibition at Duke of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were in the possession of Mar Samuel in 1950. There are some excellent photos in this collection:
I’m also reminded of the film footage of William Brownlee and John Trever with the scrolls in Jerusalem in the very early days after the discovery of the first scrolls. Again, thanks to Alexander Schick for pointing out this footage in a YouTube talk by Orit Rosengarten. The archival footage begins at 14:31:
Variant Readings 
In 1950, Duke University may have had an opportunity to buy three Scrolls, but, if I understand correctly, that did not happen less because of the price than because of the uncertainty of clear ownership title.
William H. Brownlee was instrumental in bringing those scrolls to Duke. Before I came to Duke as a grad student, I had compiled fifty-some different published etymology proposals on the name Essenes. And had noticed that Brownlee had explored in editing 1QpHab the possibility of one explanation that had been recorded as early as in 1532 and several more times before 1948: the Hebrew root ‘asah, as in the self-designation, observers of torah. I wrote to Brownlee at Claremont in the summer of 1983, only to learn of his passing. One history of scholarship publication that is often overlooked is William H. Brownlee, My Eight Years of Scroll Research, Duke Divinity School Bulletin, Nov. 1956, v. 21 n. 3, 68-81.
Thanks for that, Stephen. I see that the Brownlee article you mention is available on archive.org. It would be nice to learn where the original Brownlee film is, and whether it has been properly digitized.
The University of Manchester archive has a collection of William Brownlee letters. I was able to quote from one of them, from J. T. Milik–Milik rarely wrote letters–in my “Qumran-Related History: Contemporaries Jannaeus, Absalom, and Judah the Essene,” Pushing the Sacred Boundaries in Early Judaism and the Ancient Mediterranean (Jodi Magness FS, SJSJ 208, 2023), 310-25, here 322. George Brooke may know more.