Born on August 23, 1902 in Caroleen, North Carolina, Herbert Lee Waters spent the majority of his life in Lexington, North Carolina. As a teenager Waters worked alongside his family at the Erlanger textile mill, and developed a passion for photography, helping to run the projector at the local theatre and eventually apprenticing in the Hitchcock Studio at 118 ½ Main Street in downtown Lexington. In 1926, Waters bought the studio, and soon after married Mabel Elizabeth Gerrell, who would become his partner in running all aspects of the H. Lee Waters Studio. In addition to commercial studio photography Waters also sought freelance work, and was hired to photograph the construction of High Rock Dam in 1927.
During the Depression, when many couldn’t spare hard-won wages for a portrait but did allow themselves the luxury of going to the movies, Waters supplemented the family’s income by traveling across North Carolina and parts of Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, to film the people of the region’s communities. Between 1936 and 1942, Waters collaborated with local movie theaters to screen his films, which he called Movies of Local People and billed with the phrase "See yourself in the movies!" Waters produced films in 118 communities, visiting many of them more than once. In addition to selling tickets to the many people who appeared in his films, he also sold advertising space in his movies to local businesses. With the birth of the Waters’ third child and the entrance of the United States into World War II, Waters returned to Lexington and continued operating his photographic studio until his death in 1997. The Library of Congress listed Waters' Kannapolis film on the National Film Registry in 2004.
When Waters completed his "Movies of Local People" project in 1942, he shelved the films for years, focusing on his family and his studio portrait business. Although in the following decades Waters occasionally returned to a community to a show one of the films he'd made there, according to his daughter, Mary Waters Spaulding, it wasn't until the 1970s that Waters revisited his Movies in earnest, showing them to civic clubs in their respective towns, and oftentimes selling the films to local libraries and historical societies. Thus, the H. Lee Waters Film Collection did not come to Duke Libraries as a set, but rather in pieces over decades, beginning in the 1980s, with a number of partners: Waters himself and his family, filmmaker Tom Whiteside, film enthusiast Milo Holt, with Duke Libraries' Robert Byrd and Karen Glynn taking early stewardship of the films. In some cases Waters sold the rights to the films to Duke along with the original "reversal" (shot in camera) prints. In other cases, communities would donate films they had acquired from Waters but did not have the resources to maintain; these could be original reels, or videocassette or DVD copies of films since lost or too deteriorated to transfer again. As the number of Waters films at Duke grew, so Duke became the primary repository for the collection, although the State Archives of North Carolina also has a substantial collection of Waters films distinct from the collection at Duke. In the early 2000's, a National Film Preservation Foundation grant allowed Duke to digitally transfer a sizable portion of the collection (sadly, as is the case with aging audiovisual media, not all of the films could be saved). In subsequent years, in the maturing digital environment, Kirston Johnson, Lisa McCarty, and Craig Breaden of the Rubenstein Library coordinated the movies' online presence, with essential support from Molly Bragg, Alex Marsh, Sean Aery, and Maggie Dickson, of Duke Libraries' Digital Collections team. Ongoing support from the local archival film community, particularly Skip Elsheimer and Tom Whiteside, keeps the Waters collection on the map, and, through events such as Home Movie Day, reminds audiences that there are many Waters films that are still "lost." (As recently as 2019, an H. Lee Waters film was discovered and donated to the Rubenstein Library.) In 2015, Duke Libraries launched the first iteration of the H. Lee Waters Digital Collection, an occasion made memorable by its impact on Duke's servers: in its first day live, the collection got so many hits the Libraries' system crashed. The popularity of H. Lee Waters' Movies of Local People, and the reason the collection continues to live and grow in the decades since its author's death, is no mystery: As a filmmaker, Waters was a consummate craftsman, and even as his primary aesthetic was business-driven -- to capture as many townsfolk on celluloid as possible so he could then sell them tickets to his shows -- his compositional skill, his ability to make his subjects open up to the camera, and an evident compassion for the people he filmed, regardless of class or race, give the films a timelessness even as they so thoroughly capture their era.
According to H. Lee Waters' logbooks, he showed films in 119 communities between 1936 and 1942, in North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. We know that for some of these towns he made multiple films, but we do not know if he made a film in each of the towns where he showed a film. This list, taken from the logbooks, includes all 119 communities. Where Duke or the State Archives of North Carolina does hold a film related to the town, the town name will be linked to the page containing the films for that town.
Albemarle (N.C.) - Duke; Albemarle (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Angier (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Apex (N.C.) |
Asheboro (N.C.) |
Avondale, Caroleen, Henrietta (N.C.) |
Belmont (N.C.) |
Benson (N.C.) |
Bessemer City (N.C.) |
Boone (N.C.) |
Burlington (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Chapel Hill (N.C.) - Duke; Chapel Hill (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Charlotte (N.C.) |
Cherryville (N.C.) |
China Grove (N.C.) |
Clayton (N.C.) |
Cliffside (N.C.) |
Concord (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Conover (N.C.) |
Cooleemee (N.C.) |
Cramerton (N.C.) |
Denton (N.C.) |
Draper (N.C.) |
Durham (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Elkin (N.C.) |
Erwin (N.C.) |
Forest City (N.C.) |
Fuquay-Varina (N.C.) |
Gastonia (N.C.) |
Gibsonville (N.C.) |
Graham (N.C.) |
Granite Falls (N.C.) |
Greensboro (N.C.) |
Haw River (N.C.) |
Henderson (N.C.) |
Hickory (N.C.) |
Hillsborough (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Jackson (N.C.) |
Kannapolis (N.C.) - Duke; Kannapolis (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Kernersville (N.C.) |
Kings Mountain (N.C.) - Mauney Memorial Library (Kings Mountain) |
Leaksville (N.C.) |
Lenoir (N.C.) |
Lexington (N.C.) |
Liberty (N.C.) |
Lillington (N.C.) |
Louisburg (N.C.) |
Lumberton (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Madison (N.C.) |
Mayodan (N.C.) |
Mebane (N.C.) |
Mocksville (N.C.) |
Monroe (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Mooresville (N.C.) |
Mount Airy (N.C.) |
Mount Gilead (N.C.) |
Mount Holly (N.C.) |
Nashville (N.C.) |
Newton (N.C.) |
North Wilkesboro (N.C.) |
Norwood (N.C.) |
Oxford (N.C.) |
Pilot Mountain (N.C.) |
Pineville (N.C.) |
Pittsboro (N.C.) |
Raeford (N.C.) |
Red Springs (N.C.) |
Rockingham (N.C.) |
Rockwell (N.C.) |
Roxboro (N.C.) |
Rutherfordton (N.C.) |
Salisbury (N.C.) |
Sanford (N.C.) |
Scotland Neck (N.C.) |
Selma (N.C.) |
Shelby (N.C.) |
Siler City (N.C.) |
Smithfield (N.C.) |
Spencer (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Spindale (N.C.) |
Spray (N.C.) |
Statesville (N.C.) |
Swannanoa (N.C.) |
Taylorsville (N.C.) |
Thomasville (N.C.) |
Troy (N.C.) |
Valdese (N.C.) |
Wadesboro (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Wake Forest (N.C.) - State Archives of North Carolina |
Warrenton (N.C.) |
Winston-Salem (N.C.) |
Blacksburg (S.C.) |
Bishopville (S.C.) |
Camden (S.C.) |
Cheraw (S.C.) |
Chester (S.C.) - University of South Carolina |
Chesterfield (S.C.) |
Fort Mill (S.C.) |
Fountain Inn (S.C.) |
Gaffney (S.C.) |
Great Falls (S.C.) - University of South Carolina |
Hartsville (S.C.) |
Lancaster (S.C.) |
Lockhart (S.C.) - University of South Carolina |
Rock Hill (S.C.) |
Timmonsville (S.C.) |
Whitmire (S.C.) |
Winnsboro (S.C.) |
Woodruff (S.C.) |
York (S.C.) |
Bassett (Va.) |
Damascus (Va.) |
Dante (Va.) |
Danville (Va.) |
Fieldale (Va.) |
Lebanon (Va.) |
Martinsville (Va.) |
Saltville (Va.) |
Wytheville (Va.) |
Mountain City (Tn.) |