Leon H. Caverly was born on November 22, 1884 in Dover, New Hampshire, married in the early 1900s and had a child. His wife died in the flu pandemic of 1918, by which time Caverly was a cinematographer who in June 1917 had joined the Marine Corps Publicity Bureau. His daughter was raised by his wife's mother.

Caverly was sent to Europe where he documented military activities in France, Belgium, and Germany with both motion picture and still photography. He writes in a later letter that a film titled America's Answer to the Hungs, the second official U.S. government war film, contains much of his work. A surviving print of this film has not yet been located. After the Armistice, he worked filming Russian prisoner camps in Germany and German civilian riots in Berlin. In September of 1919, the Marines sent Caverly to Cuba and Haiti for six months to do documentary photography. He was mustered out in 1920.

He returned to private sector employment, and through the 1920s he seems to have worked for or with traveler and travel writer E.M. Newman, traveling and photographing for the "Newman Traveltalks" books; Seeing Paris(1931) includes 300 Caverly photographs. He married a second time in 1925, to Grace V. Kopp, and may have had his own business from 1926 to 1929 or 1930. In 1933, the Caverly's had a daughter, Lynn Gail Caverly Hartung. Damaged financially by the 1929 stock market crash, he took a took a job as a photostat operator in New York City, in which position he remained until he retired in 1956, at the age of 72. He died December 12, 1966, and was buried in the Long Island National Cemetary.

Some of his World War I glass slides and photographs were donated to the Historical Society in Newark, New Jersey. There is also a collection of Caverly's materials at the Smithsonian Musuem in Washington, D.C.