Hanging on a wall on the first floor of the Edmondston-Alston House on South Battery is one of 11 remaining copies of the Ordinance of Secession.

Peering at it, Charles Duell points to the names of his ancestors, the Middletons, who put their signatures to the document.

He remarks their grandfather Arthur Middleton and other ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence less than a century before.

“This document tells the story of how this generation destroyed the Union their grandparents had put together,” he said.

And in fact, Duell has also preserved a copy of the Declaration of Independence at Middleton Place, the sprawling plantation on the banks of the Ashley River. Founded by Henry Middleton, second president of the First Continental Congress, the plantation has stood through Colonial times, two wars, the 1886 earthquake and Hurricane Hugo, to say nothing of nearly three centuries’ worth of wear and tear by its inhabitants and even the salty sea air of the Lowcountry.

That longevity is partly due to the efforts of Duell, who unexpectedly inherited both Middleton Place and the 19th century Edmondston-Alston House in 1969. He has spent the past half-century restoring and preserving both properties, setting up the Middleton Place Foundation in 1974 to help fund the ongoing efforts.

Despite joking that he could have sold the properties and bought a couple of airplanes, Duell said it never occurred to him to do anything other than preserve the history.

“I just knew that my mission, if you will, is to work on saving it and keeping it alive and well,” Duell said.

To recognize his work, Duell will receive the 2023 ACBA Honors Award on Feb. 8, a national recognition the American College of the Building Arts gives annually to those who have made their mark in the preservation of historic places or building arts.

Based in Charleston, ACBA teaches students traditional forms of art, architecture and building through hands-on training in crafts like blacksmithing, carpentry and masonry.

Graduates leave the school with a unique understanding of historic building techniques and, therefore, how to apply them to preserve architectural sites, said ACBA Chief Advancement Officer Leigh Handel. Students at ACBA have even interned at Middleton Place, demonstrating their crafts for tourists and lending their talents to preservation efforts.

Middleton Place is one of the few sites that can give such a long accounting of history, Handel said. Its story starts in South Carolina’s Colonial era and goes through the Revolutionary War, the antebellum South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the early 20th century, civil rights and into the modern day.

“A lot of places could tell a Colonial story, but it ends at the Civil War. Other places can tell an antebellum story, but it doesn’t include a Colonial component,” Handel said.

“Middleton Place starts from the beginning of Charleston today and interprets the whole nine yards. And that’s thanks to him.”

A mission Duell never imagined he would one day be caretaker of one of the most famous historical sites in the Lowcountry.

The grandson of Heningham and Pringle Smith, who started the preservation efforts in the early 20th century, Duell grew up only visiting his grandparents at Middleton Place on vacation.

As an adult, he studied accounting, spent a few years in France and embarked on a financial career on Wall Street until he inherited the properties at the age of 31.

He spent the first five years living at Middleton Place and fixing up the Edmondston- Alston House. When that was done in 1974, he moved his family to the South Battery house and turned his attention to the further preservation of Middleton Place.

While his grandparents had begun the effort to preserve the property, particularly the gardens which Duell’s grandmother was fond of, they hadn’t had the financial resources to make it much more than a “gentleman’s country farm,” Duell said. Those who visited Middleton Place did so mainly to see the gardens, said Tracey Todd, president and CEO of Middleton Place Foundation.

Duell put his financial background to use to transform Middleton Place into a business model that would thrive and pay for itself over the years. He borrowed money and sought the advice of leading Charleston preservationists and organizations like the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Historic Charleston Foundation.

He renovated the stable yards and opened the House Museum, starting the Middleton Place Foundation initially to be in charge of research and education on the property, Todd said.

Duell and the foundation also relied heavily on the generosity of the spread-out descendants of those who had lived on Middleton Place, who at his request donated furniture, paintings, silverware and other objects that had become family heirlooms.

Now, Duell proudly said, 95 percent of the objects at Middleton Place were owned by members of the family.

“The result is that when you visit the house, it’s one of the few houses that really has that high a percentage of original family objects,” he said.

In 1983, Duell gave Middleton Place to the foundation, with the goal that it would be owner and operator of the site in perpetuity. He remained as president and CEO of the foundation as Middleton Place grew into a thriving tourism destination. When he inherited the property, it ran on a budget of about $30,000 a year. Now it’s $8.5 million. Duell said it makes money not just from tourism and donations, but through events such as weddings and stays at the inn.

All of this allows the site to operate as one of the most historic education sites in the country, said Todd, echoing Handel’s point about Middleton Place being significant from Colonial history to the modern day.

A more complete story Duell also knew restoring Middleton Place was about more than just preserving the buildings and gardens. The objects are there to tell the story of the people who worked and lived on the plantation.

“It’s really talking about the people that were there and why they’re interesting to us today,” he said.

That included the stories of the enslaved Black laborers on the plantation. One of the first projects at Middleton Place was renovating the stable yards and using them to teach about the life of the enslaved people on the plantation. That was extremely unusual in the 1970s, Todd said.

It has always been easier in America to tell the story of European settlers and their descendants because they tended to be documented better, said Duell’s wife, Sallie. But “from the very beginning, he was conscious of telling the story of the enslaved people,” she said.

After the renovation of the stable yards, the foundation got to work on genealogical research, not just on the descendants of Henry Middleton but on the enslaved laborers as well, Todd said. Since then, Middleton Place’s focus on Black history has continued to evolve in its research.

In the 1990s, researchers were able to identify families in the area whose ancestors had worked on the property, Todd said. In 2001, White descendants of the Middletons who had been having reunions at Middleton Place for several years began extending invitations to those families as well.

At the most recent reunion in November, “We had about 300 Middleton descendants show up, both European and African American,” he said.

The foundation also implemented tours called Beyond the Fields in the early 2000s to tell the story of enslaved people on the plantation. That evolved into a permanent exhibit, a book and even a PBS series in 2017. Now, there is a wall on the property engraved with the names of about 3,200 enslaved people who lived and worked at Middleton Place.

It’s important to have that complete look at history in order to understand why our society is the way it is today, Todd said — which, he added, may be a cliché, but only because it’s true.

“If we know the path that we’ve had to get to 2023, and we also know the path of ... another part of our community and how they got to 2023, if we know that, that will shape our thinking,” Todd said. “And we will be able to make better decisions in our own communities, in our own state, in our own country knowing these things.

“Middleton Place is a place where people can learn that.”

There are other educational opportunities as well. If the objects and buildings on the site tell the story of the people who lived there, as the Duells pointed out, then so do the tour guides and interns on the site. Students from ACBA work out of the blacksmith shop, demonstrating to tourists what those trades were like in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Those educational opportunities wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for Duell and what Todd called his “selfless” devotion to preservation, he and Handel said.

“If he had sold it, and it was in strictly private hands, you and I couldn’t learn from our visit there,” Handel said. “But the way he set up the foundation, he really protected a place that (tells) very much the American story.”

Duell stepped back from his role as the head of the foundation in 2018, when Todd became president. He is still recognized as a major player in historic preservation in Charleston, having sat on architecture and historic boards and winning awards from national organizations.

History is an ongoing story, and as long as people like Charles Duell are around, that story can be protected and retold.