Whitney: a thin trail that still deserves a stake
Ask an outsider's internet for “Whitney of Preston, Missouri,” and it mostly shrugs. Ask a Preston neighbor, and the answer may fill an afternoon. This page is the stake in the ground until then.
The Osage Regiment / county military materials do include a James M. Whitney among listed names—enough to prove the surname walked Hickory County ground in wartime paperwork, not enough by itself to write a century of Preston backbone history.
Broader Missouri Whitney research online tends to point at other counties (Grundy, Carroll, Cape Girardeau). Those are cousins of geography, not evidence. For this site, the Whitney story should grow from Society vertical files, cemetery directories, school registers, and Index clippings—not from remote trees grafted on.
If Whitneys farmed, taught, clerked, or married into Howard / Bybee / Snyder / Greene lines near Preston, those are the sentences still waiting to be written from Society files and local memory.
Sources: surname hit in Osage Regiment / county military HTML; negative result from public Preston-specific Whitney narratives online. Treat as a starting point until Society documentation fills in more detail.