It is named for its reddish-brown plumage and for its area of origin, Bourbon County, Kentucky, where it was developed in the last years of the nineteenth century.

It was accepted into the Standard of Perfection of the American Poultry Association in 1909, and in the early twentieth century was an important commercial meat breed until the Broad Breasted White began to dominate industrial production.

Barbee, and is thought to have been based on a particularly dark strain of Buff Turkey from Pennsylvania called the Tuscawara or Tuscarora Red, with some admixture of White Holland and Bronze stock.

In the interwar period the Bourbon Red was widely reared, particularly as a farm bird in the Midwest, but numbers declined rapidly after the adoption of the Broad Breasted White for industrial production.

In 1999 the Society for the Preservation of Poultry Antiquities found approximately 1000 birds, and in 2003 the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy (as it was then known) counted more than 1500.