Alabama Poppy Project moves from Prattville to Mobile in 2026

The Alabama Poppy Project has left Prattville for Mobile, shifting its 2026 Memorial Day exhibition away from downtown Autauga County and into the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park. The display opened Friday, May 22, and runs through May 26, carrying with it a tradition that began on Memorial Day 2020 with 1,000 handmade stoneware poppies in historic downtown Prattville.

This year’s exhibit features 2,026 red stoneware poppies mounted on steel rods, each marked with a white silk ribbon bearing the name of a deceased service member. The project has expanded each year to match the calendar, growing from 2,024 poppies in 2024 to more than 2,025 in the 2025 indoor display at Julianne Hansen Fine Art & Pottery in Prattville. The 2025 move indoors came because of construction, but the 2026 relocation to Mobile marks a bigger change for the community that first hosted it.

Prattville artist Julianne Hansen founded the Alabama Poppy Project with Steven Hansen, inspired by the World War I-era memorial poppy tradition. The tribute also grew out of personal loss: the first poppy was placed in memory of Steven Hansen’s son, Air Force Capt. Kyle Steven Hansen, who died in 2017. Since then, the project has become one of Prattville’s most visible Memorial Day observances, with poppy fields previously displayed at places such as Spillway Park.

The move matters because it leaves Prattville with fewer public reminders of Memorial Day’s cost. Local reporting says the downtown banner program is now the city’s last remaining prominent public Memorial Day tribute for some families, a shift that underscores how much of the community’s veteran-centered observance has been tied to the poppy project itself. American Legion Post 122 and VFW Post 1349 remain part of Prattville’s veterans’ landscape, but the poppy installation’s absence will be felt most in the public spaces where residents have gathered to see it.

The project’s organizers have said the display has also drawn requests to bring poppy tributes to other communities, and Mobile now becomes the next place to carry the exhibit. For Prattville, the change closes a chapter that began in downtown storefronts and civic spaces, and it leaves the city with a narrower public stage for honoring military service each May.