You didn't try very hard...

http://www.mtpulaskiil.com/175th/175th-HistoryOfMtPulaski/Hi...

"A few years before, Mr. Lincoln had purchased the newspaper, The Springfield Gazette, which was a German-written newspaper that he had delivered to Mount Pulaski and other parts of central Illinois that had heavy German populations."

That said, I'm pretty sure this blog post is a piece of fiction. The "privacy controls" section is pretty telling IMHO.

It's a neat story, but I am suspicious too. The photo in the Springfield Gazette is a mirror image of this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abelincoln1846.jpeg . Wikipedia claims this photo is from 1846, but the newspaper is from 1845. Also, I would be surprised if a photo could be printed with that level of detail in 1845.

I wonder if this more of a tribute to P.T. Barnum (the first subject mentioned in the article) than Abraham Lincoln.

Remember they didn't have raster images in 1845. That would have been a physical stamp of some kind that was inked and pressed along with the type (or maybe afterward, since this seems to be a one-off). The historian in the story claims Lincoln used this picture a lot, so it's likely that he commissioned a physical block made for this purpose, quite high-quality and reusable in multiple publications.