Is there a bitcoin source, fork available that does not include a GUI? I would like to try to download and compile a barebones variation of the Bitcoin daemon.  Specifically, I'd would prefer to not have a copy of the code with any GUI implementation.

Does such a reliable, and maintained, forked project exist on Github or any where else?
Yes. If you compile the bitcoin client using the following commands, it will not build the GUI components:

./autogen.sh
./configure --without-gui
make