Using the same attention he had to previously concentrated on his company, Whitcomb scoured the Los Angeles Basin, and determined that he should relocate the family there. He would continue to run his company, now renamed the Whitcomb Locomotive Works, through the means of telegraph messages and with the assistance of trusted employees in the Chicago offices. By the early 1880s the family was living in a rented home near downtown Los Angeles and Whitcomb was homing in on the location for his latest and most lasting endeavor, the creation of a new foothill town.