The Edgartown summer home that belonged to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara changed hands last week for $11.25 million.

The buyer is a trust whose principals are unknown.

Nestled deep in the Oyster Watcha midlands in the rural coastal perimeters of Edgartown, the house was the first place President Clinton stayed with his family when he began vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard in 1993.

The property includes 11.5 acres and a house and was owned by the descendants of Mr. McNamara, former Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, former World Bank president and longtime summer resident of Martha’s Vineyard. Mr. McNamara died in 2009.

The property at Oyster Watcha has an unusual history. The land was originally part of a conservation purchase in 1961 that included 460 acres owned by the late George D. Flynn of Pohogonot Farm — extending from the Edgartown-West Tisbury Road southerly along the entire shore of Oyster Pond to the Atlantic Ocean.

Mr. McNamara joined a consortium of 13 people to by the property for $2.3 million. Other buyers in the consortium included Nicholas Freydberg and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Most of the property was placed in conservation, with 15 low-profile single family homes allowed. At the time it was considered one of the largest and most significant land sales on the Vineyard.

“These people are not adventurers or speculators but the type which we, at Pohogonot, will welcome as neighbors across the Oyster Pond,” Mr. Flynn said in a statement at the time of the sale.

Once open grassland that ran to the pond and sea, the area today is covered with second-growth scrub oak, stunted by salt spray, sassafras and bayberry. Mr. McNamara built a house overlooking the pond sometime in the late 1980s. Named Sandpiper Point, the house became the first Summer White House when the Clintons occupied it in August 1993. The next year they moved to a home owned by Richard Friedman, also on Oyster Pond.

The sale was recorded on June 26, sending $225,000 to Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank coffers.